Volkswagen Engineer Pleads Guilty in US Diesel Emissions Probe (fortune.com) 110
A Volkswagen AG engineer on Friday pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate in the Justice Department's probe into the German automaker's diesel emissions scandal -- the first person charged by U.S. authorities in the environmental probe, reports Reuters. From the report:James Liang, who has worked for VW VLKPF since 1983 and was part of a team of engineers who developed a diesel engine, was charged in an indictment made public on Friday with conspiring to commit wire fraud and violating U.S. clean air laws. The 62-year-old engineer from Newbury Park, Calif., appeared in U.S. District Court in Detroit on Friday and entered into a plea agreement that includes his cooperation with the government in its investigation. The indictment says Liang conspired with current and former VW employees to mislead U.S. regulators about the software that allowed the automaker to evade American emissions standards.
Re: VW Engineer (Score:2, Informative)
Meanwhile, the methane leak in Los Angeles last year caused more pollution than all of the affected VW's could ever hope to create in their lifespan.
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Point being issues deserve attention in media in proportion to their effects.
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Call me when the manager that told him to do it gets locked up.
THAT will be news.
scapegoat much? (Score:5, Insightful)
WTF? why does some engineer get thrown under the VW bus?
Re:scapegoat much? (Score:5, Insightful)
C-level motto: "Always have a patsy on hand."
I have had management try to make me into a patsy before. Always save your emails. Don't do anything unless you have it in writing.
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Re:scapegoat much? (Score:4, Insightful)
Text files that are timestamped and stored on a server, often with multiple copies.
I don't know how often e-mails are used in court but if you don't have an original signed document, this is probably the next best thing.
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This guy is near retirement, will likely only serve a commuted sentence due to age and good behavior, and probably have a nice golden parachute.
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A) Who says he will be the only one facing charges?
B) If your boss asks you to do something illegal and you agree, you are still committing a crime, but best to make sure that request is in writing so you can drag them to jail with you as well.
C) If only he would have hosted all of his emails on a private email server then allowed a backup copy to be lost in the mail and ordered a subordinate to wipe other backups... then he not only wouldn't be looking at jail time, but could be a Democrat Presidential Nom
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A) Sadly true. It was still his own choice to commit the crime though, he could have found a new job instead.
B) Can you prove he wasn't? The idea is to drag him down with you to lessen the punishment for your own guilt. He is of course free to do the same thing further up/across the hierarchy.
C) Why would you rely on the company email server to retain blackmail/plea-bargain material for you?
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Prosecutions always start at the bottom. Prosecutors offer plea deals to get subordinates to testify against their bosses, and the first guy to defect gets the best deal. They will work their way up the food chain.
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He's not a 'scapegoat' unless the jews put goats on cruise ships with fat pensions. The guy isn't a victim, he's a guy getting an early retirement with benefits in exchange for being 'caught'.
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but could be a Democrat Presidential Nominee... if he happened to be a natural born US citizen.
Eh, they can probably get around that too these days.
That was Wells Fargo... (Score:3)
http://www.npr.org/2016/09/09/... [npr.org]
With all the corporate crime going on, it is easy to get your scumbags mixed up....
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What To Do If Your Boss Asks You To Do Something Unethical or Illegal [managerwise.com]
Re: scapegoat much? (Score:2)
The choice is to do the job or get fired with a bad reputation. Good luck finding a decent job after that.
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Good luck finding a decent job after you've picked up a criminal record.
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I'd take a criminal record for something the company is responsible for rather than an employer record where I'm listed as untrustworthy if I have to choose. The latter blocks you from every job out there.
What you are convicted for actually matters for some employers - breaking the law upon command from a superior or not matters a lot. Even if the command was not written down.
Re: scapegoat much? (Score:1)
I'm a lawyer...never seen a Rolex and the only blowjobs I get are for good behavior from my wife. I think you vastly overestimate an attorney's earning power and prestige.
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>Fines don't discourage anything.
Well, not at a management level, not the way they're implemented in the US. If fines for such things were, say, 50% of your net worth things might be different.
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You might be right, and if we ever see management paying more than pocket change in fines I'll concede the point. First we'll have to start actually convicting them though.
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If I was a multimillionaire, 90% of my net income would suck, but I'd still probably be rich or at least upper middle class.
If this guy got nailed with 90% or even 50% of his net income, he'd lose his house.
Fines like this cannot just be a percentage, they need to match the circumstances.
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Which is why I said worth, not income. What's the combined value of your house, your yacht, your stocks, your retirement portfolio, etc.? You lose half of that.
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Hmm. Touch my pension and I might as well kill you. There's no point living through the shit without the hope it will end one day.
Take away that hope, and I may as well take away the living. But not without revenge first.
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Hey, you chose to risk it when you committed the crime.
He needs the jail / prison health care plan till65 (Score:2)
He needs the jail / prison health care plan till 65.
Always starts at the bottom (Score:5, Insightful)
WTF? why does some engineer get thrown under the VW bus?
Because they are the easiest to get to. Hopefully they'll work their way up the ladder. It's almost always hardest to get to the guys at the top and you usually have to start at the bottom and work up. He'll probably get a lighter sentence in exchange for giving up a bigger fish and then the bigger fish will get a deal to give up the next guy up the food chain. Eventually you get to the top but it takes a while and a lot of work.
Re: Always starts at the bottom (Score:2)
We're talking about someone who was complicit in a fraud. I see no value in sympathy. They could easily have refused to be a part of this crime.
How does a VW engineer cheat for Audi and Porsche? (Score:2)
This scandal goes all the way up. The cheat crossed over to other badges, which are calibrated by entirely different teams. At the very least, some director who sits above all the badge bosses was involved in perpetrating this fraud.
Calibration engineers had to work on, and test, two sets of calibrations - the "cheat mode" values and the standard values. Somebody had to direct them to do this. This isn't just a Degiorgio being lazy and signing off on crap parts to clear his worklog - this is a systematic ef
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Because the Engineer is a high enough position of have responsibility for what they do. However not high enough if convicted to show a systemic problem in the organization.
I have left jobs, because I had found myself going down a slippery slope, a minor tweak here, cut a corner, tell a little white lie there, over inflate an estimate there... So I usually start looking for new work when I realize I am getting to a point where I see that I am becoming what I hate.
However for many people they may not have the
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Re: scapegoat much? (Score:1)
As well as NoX.
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I wonder how much money he's being paid to take the fall.
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The guy is 62 years old, near retirement.
Most likely there's been agreements made behind closed doors between VW and US prosecutors; they guy gets some kind of deal that involves him not ever going to jail, he also gets some kind of 'severance/pension' thing for his part in this theater.
A 'guilty' person has been found, what VW did wrong... or the story they agreed on... is now in the legal system and VW will be made to pay their (pre-arranged) dues. And _EVERYONE_ is now happy and the air will be cleaner.
Indictments please climb the corp. ladder (Score:3)
Hopefully there is paperwork to show management had a hand in this; this kind of culture needs to stop. Mr. Engineer, wink... bonus...wink... standards... wink.
How many counts? (Score:5, Insightful)
So if he is responsible for the creation "defeat device", is he responsible for the installation on every vehicle sold in the US?
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Probably not, but on the other hand, blame could be fairly limited in scope. If I programmed some code with a root kit in it, my boss wouldn't need to be involved for it to be distributed to all my customers, I'd just need to make sure it was properly hidden so it made through the certification process without triggering any extra review.
And we assume that everyone at VW would have known about it. Its usually a lot more murky than that. Usually some middle manager needs to get a raise or make a target, a
Yeah, we all know it was a rogue engineer (Score:2)
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I actually disagree.
There are plenty of situations that could be torpedoed by the engineer refusing to do the work. Engineers are not disposable.
Do not underestimate your ability to say "No" to something that is obviously illegal. You will end that shit right there in most cases. Especially when up against your own lower level boss who is probably less than pleased himself about having to ask you to do it.
And do not believe for a second that there are not engineers who will collaborate because they want
Hooray for scapegoats (Score:3)
I wonder what's actually happening here. No one in a high-profile civil case pleads guilty unless they have a real reason to. Is VW paying his family an exorbitant sum of money through a back-channel?
There's no way an engineer comes up with a scheme like this on their own. I know for myself that I'd be too much of an honest guy to go along with that. Yes, I know that makes me an idiot. But management is always involved in things like this, or at the very least is willfully blind. German companies are very meticulous, so I'm sure they have the exact email, timestamped to the millisecond, showing the management team telling the engineers to put the defeat device in.
Definitely not just one person (Score:2)
There's no way an engineer comes up with a scheme like this on their own.
Even if he did there is no way to keep it a secret for long and it would be virtually impossible for management to not know about it. But engineering is pretty much a team sport with a product this complex and there would be no way it would be one rogue engineer. It simply doesn't work that way.
German companies are very meticulous, so I'm sure they have the exact email, timestamped to the millisecond, showing the management team telling the engineers to put the defeat device in.
More than likely this is true. It shouldn't be too hard to work their way up the food chain if the investigators are sufficiently motivated and funded.
VW's President is Responible for His Company (Score:2)
Why throw this engineer under the bus? He was likely following orders.
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So what? (Score:3)
...I'll believe someone's getting punished when SENIOR MANAGEMENT is seeing jail time or fines in excess of several years' pay.
Hauling one nearly-retired engineer up in the dock doesn't mean shit.
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You can't seriously believe that, can you?
You're asserting that some middling engineer-manager came up with this strategy entirely on his own? Failed to share it with his management?
Yeah.
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I don't think you really understand how corporations work.
eat each other (Score:1)
US pushing Volkswagen case, EU pushing Apple case. NIce!
Where's Lee Majors? (Score:2)
I might fall from a tall building,
I might roll a brand new car.
'Cause I'm the unknown stuntman that made Redford such a star.
For some reason, I've got The Fall Guy stuck in my head now.
Government regulation at work (Score:1)
Note how the VW emission scandal came to light thanks to US regulators. We often think of the EU being ahead of the game in this sort of thing, but European car emissions testers are private entities that compete for business. This creates an incentive to "cook the books" and give manufacturers an easy time. US regulators, on the other hand, are public entities and have no such incentive to be nice to the auto manufacturers. Hence, a stricter testing regime that uncovered a culture of corner-cutting and che
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It was discovered by researchers at an American university, not regulators. And the diesel standards in the Sates are much stricter than the EU.
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Firstly, soot standards are stricter in Europe than in the US. It is NOx where the US is (much) stricter. Secondly, the scandal has nothing to do with fuel efficiency and it changes nothing about the fact that diesel engines are more fuel efficient and use a fuel that costs less energy to produce. Finally, modern diesel engines produce fewer volatile hydrocarbons and ultra-fine particulates than petrol engines, both of which are known to cause cancer, as well as less carbon monoxide. There is often an order
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just makes me wonder... (Score:2)
How much VW are paying him to take the fall...