Volkswagen was sentenced Friday in federal court after pleading guilty in January to multiple criminal charges and $4.3 billion in penalties surrounding its diesel emissions scandal.
The sentence, read by U.S. district judge Sean Cox in Detroit, formalizes the company’s plea to pay $2.8 billion for criminal charges including “conspiracy to defraud the United States” in violation of the Clean Air Act, obstruction of justice for “destroying documents related to the scheme,” and making false statements about emissions compliance on importing all 590,000 affected cars into the United States. VW must now pay an additional $1.45 billion to settle civil violations with the Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Lastly, VW will pay a $50 million civil fine for violation of the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act for underwriting loans and leases for the affected cars. Larry D. Thompson, a former deputy U.S. attorney general under George W. Bush, will oversee VW as a corporate compliance monitor for the next three years. According to Automotive News, without the plea agreement VW might have faced a penalty of $17 billion to $34 billion.
“The laborer at VW is going to lose millions of euros in bonus money,” Cox was quoted as saying during the hearing. “The bonuses have shrunk and will shrink because of the billions of dollars VW has had to pay because of the fraud.”
Cox said he doesn’t think VW will end up in criminal court again after this.
“Hopefully, the other corporations involved in the manufacture and supply of automobiles will learn from this and think twice,” he said.
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