Rupert Stadler
Former Audi CEO Rupert Stadler admits he made mistakes during Audi’s diesel emissions cheating. This confession almost certainly means that Stadler will disappear behind bars, although there is talk of a reduced sentence.
When Rupert Stadler was CEO of Audi, the manufacturer cheated on a large scale with the emissions of diesel engines. They led things around in emissions tests, so that the power sources in practice emitted more NOx than emerged during the tests. Stadler was formally charged with involvement in the diesel scandal in 2019 and issued an initial statement in 2021. He would have been ‘too busy’ to realize what was happening, Stadler stated at the time. Now he’s drawing the scandal more to himself. On Tuesday, Stadler declares through his lawyer in the court in Munich: “I understand that more care was needed on my part”, quoted by Reuters.
The lawyer emphasizes that Stadler maintains that he did not know about the fraud when it happened, but that he accepted that it may have happened. Stadler thus acknowledges negligence. That he now takes partial responsibility for the diesel scandal and pays a fine of €1.1 million, as the court previously ordered him to do. Reuters presented as an option means that Stadler will probably have to spend only one and a half to two years in prison. Otherwise, he could face up to ten years in prison for fraud. The verdict is expected to follow in June and Stadler will hear whether it will indeed stick to that.
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– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl