Former Audi boss charged in Munich

Munich prosecutors have charged the man who presided over Audi’s role in the Dieselgate diesel-emissions cheating scandal.

Former Audi CEO Rupert Stadler and three other defendants have been charged by the Munich Public Prosecutor’s office over the scandal that saw him arrested in his home and jailed 13 months ago.

Prosecutors have charged him with false certification and criminal advertising, even though they’ve been unable to prove that he knew of the emissions-cheating software implementation before September 2015 when the scandal broke.

"Defendant Stadler is accused of having been aware of the manipulations since the end of September 2015, at the latest, but he did not prevent the sale of affected Audi and VW vehicles thereafter," a statement from the prosecutor read.

The three other defendants, two of whom have yet to be named by prosecutors, are accused of being at the heart of the development of the software and its subsequent mass production, which saw it fitted to more than 12 million Audi, Seat, Skoda, Porsche and Volkswagen vehicles.

The second defendant named was Wolfgang Hatz, the former Volkswagen Group board member for powertrain and the development director of Porsche.

Hatz was imprisoned without trial for more than six months last year and was released on bail on strict conditions, including posting a €3 million bond, reporting twice daily to the Stuttgart police station and surrendering his passport.

Both Hatz and Stadler have long denied their part in the scandal, while Audi itself refused to comment beyond insisting that both men were entitled to be presumed innocent until proven guilty.

At least 23 people remain under investigation by the Munich prosecutor’s office into the scandal, while their counterparts at Stuttgart and Braunschweig (Brunswick) also have other Volkswagen Group employees in their sights.

The Braunschweig prosecutors have even charged Dr Winterkorn over the scandal, though there is no date for a trial yet.

There are investigations into everything from the genesis of the scandal to its stock market implications, with both current CEO Herbert Diess (who was at BMW during the formative years of Dieselgate) and Chairman Hans Dieter Poetsche over their tardiness in informing shareholders of the scale of the problem.

The legal ramifications over the scandal have dragged on ever since, costing the Volkswagen Group more than €28 billion and the jobs of its CEO Dr Martin Winterkorn and his successor Matthias Mueller, among others.

The software cheat began life as a testing-only code called the “acoustic cycle” designed to minimise the cold-start noise of diesel engines. The acoustic function was developed by Audi’s engineers.

Stadler spent months in prison after allegedly discussing ways to cover up the issue on his home telephone, which had been bugged by prosecutors.

They spent months trying to get to the finance-oriented man once touted as a possible Volkswagen Group CEO, including raiding his office on the morning of Audi’s annual general meeting – twice – and even parking in his reserved space.

The Volkswagen Group then paid out the remainder of Stadler’s contract with an €8 million parachute on the proviso that he was not found guilty of any crime related to Dieselgate.