I long for the day that ANYTHING close to this happens in the USA
Seems like it also doesn’t happen in Germany, as the post title doesn’t match the article.
The two people sent to jail are middle managers (Head of XY), not executives.
Why aim low, why not public flogging, and pillories?
How about we don’t bring back corporal punishment. I get the sentiment, but i’d rather our justice system didn’t turn into a torture system.
I’m used to executives being above the law. I had to read the article to be sure the title wasn’t clickbait.
It is very puzzling, isn’t it? Why VW execs are put in jail and banking execs that created a global recession get off scot free?
oh that’s easy. the VW execs were under the jurisdiction of a country that gives a fuck and knows what the consecuences of unchecked greed are. the bankers were under the jurisdiction of a country that thinks maybe a little bit of fascism wouldn’t be so bad, all things considered
Except, as noted above, they were jailed in US too.
Because that act didn’t hurt an American company
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They are, the post title is false. The people going to jail are middle managers
In Canada we were told that putting execs in jail would “hurt jobs” and we had to pass a law that said they just get a fine instead.
The execs in question were caught selling hookers to Qaddafi’s son.
Do you have any more info on that particular story? Research purposes.
Search for SNC-Lavalin + Saadi Gadhafi, you’ll get a lot of hits, for many different things. SNC-Lavalin was such a corrupt firm. Still are, most likely, though they changed name to AtkinsRéalis.
(To note : a few high positioned people got sent to prison over the years, but I don’t know enough about this particular case to know what really happened.)
Before this, I afraid Justin Trudeau was privileged elite, born with a silver spoon in his mouth.
After what he did to Jody Wilson-Raybould, I knew Justin Trudeau was a out of touch tone deaf, nepo baby. Truly he was never able to relate to us Canadian “normies”.
One insanity in the following years was how they thought people still wanted their next generation diesel.
I’ve been working for them in the 2010s with the department to organise the staff car fleet. We ordered many electric vehicles years ahead from production and planned it all around electric vehicles: Charging stations, operating distance, some hybrids for long distance, software to calculate trips etc.
Then a few months before we needed them, they said: We overproduced on the latest diesel generation and can’t keep up with the demand for electric vehicles, so we have to sell the ones you ordered. You can either go with a Tesla (for official Volkswagen business trips!) or have the diesel for free.
It felt like there was a hysteria: Decision makers got it in their heads that the “hype” for electric vehicles was ideology-driven and not something people with buying power actually wanted today or in the near future. Bit like the republican administration thinking that “woke” is our main problem. Meanwhile, huge research and development departments did come up with the electric vehicles they sell today (and fully working hydrogen prototypes you won’t see in a store, just to be safe) and must have been quite frustrated that so few were produced.
Before anyone becomes too happy: the post’s title is inaccurate, the two people sent to jail are only middle managers:
What’s Volkswagen’s org structure like? I wouldn’t normally expect a department head to be middle management.
I… I thought a middle manager is any manager who’s not the very lowest manager, and not the CEO? As in, any manager who has managers above and below them?
I thought middle management was the guy in between the crew and upper management?
Absolute shit stressful job, btw. Never doing that shit again. If you have a heart, that job will kill it.
Good question - I also don’t know how clear those definitions are. In my head all managers that are under department heads would be middle, and department heads + C-suite would be upper/senior management. And the subset of upper management that is C-level is, well, C-level.
Think of them more like division heads. Not quite a regular middle manager, but not C-suite.
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This! Finally! This will make other execs scratch themselves behind the ears and consider their life choices. Fines for the company they work for won’t, as these same execs just budget these fines into the crimes they’re planning to commit.
Fuck these frauds, hope they stay in for years.
Also, continue doing this, jail all the execs that break the law.
Despite what the headline says, no execs went to jail. The two who were punished with jail terms were middle management.
Martin Winterkorn, the CEO, will probably avoid any serious consequences.
I only have cursory knowledge of this incident, but: It’s possible that was the right outcome. A lot of middle managers do some heinous shit, and then report only positive news to upper management with a “Don’t worry about it” attitude.
We all know there’s also evil CEOs in the world as well, but maybe the investigation found this wasn’t one of them. 'Course, maybe they were just better at keeping plausible deniability.
The Board had discussions about how to stonewall California. US prosecutors have filed charges against the CEO but Germany won’t extradite.
They are all guilty as fuck.
Of course Germany won’t extradite we don’t extradite nationals to non-EU countries. It can even happen that we don’t extradite Americans to the US because they can demonstrate that they’re likely to face torture in the US, such as isolation cells.
Yeah, the second one. It’s the ones prepared to do shit like that who get promoted in the first place.
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Damn, assassination for air pollution is new for me.
The rich choose to exert violence on everyone else daily. This is community defense.
Lying about emissions is violence? Like chemical warfare?
Profit over people is violence. If a single person is harmed by your lie, that is violence against humanity.
But they have to be rich, right? I’m interested in the criteria.
What about a nation that supports a company who produces goods that allow the company to make profit, and the production of the goods harms people’s lives (e.g. pollution or poor working conditions in the production country). Somebody should police that nation. Maybe bomb the nation?
Good. Finally they’re facing some actual consequences for their actions.
This sounds like actual impactful consequences and accountability for the rich exploitative asshole executives actually responsible? Did I forget to wake up in the morning?
The dieselgate scandal is why I am so disappointed when I heard that Volkswagen outsold Tesla in Europe for the number one spot since the start of the year. I have been hoping it would a more scrupulous company (and non-Chinese EV manufacturer) that took the number one spot for European EV cars sold.
Most people don’t know that it wasn’t just VW. Sadly I don‘t think you will find any moral acting car manufacturer out there.
Automakers who have been caught using a defeat device within a diesel vehicle, in a similar manner to Volkswagen include: Jeep and Ram under FCA[391] (now a part of Stellantis), Opel[392] (when under GM), and Mercedes-Benz.[393]
While not all using defeat devices, diesel vehicles built by a wide range of carmakers, including Volvo, Renault, Mercedes, Jeep, Hyundai, Citroen, BMW, Mazda, Fiat, Ford and Peugeot[48][49] had independent tests carried out by ADAC that proved that, under normal driving conditions, many diesel vehicles exceeded legal European emission limits for nitrogen oxide (NOx), some by more than 10 times, and one by 14 times.[49]
Beyond exclusively diesel or passenger vehicles, automakers such as: Hino[414] (subsidiary of Toyota), Hyundai and Kia,[415] Nissan,[416] Mazda, Yamaha Motors, Suzuki,[417] Subaru,[418] and others have been proven to be falsifying fuel economy or emissions on non-diesel powered and/or commercial vehicles.
Volkswagen was definitely had the loudest outrage but as you mention, anyone making a diesel was doing the same thing.
And to your point about morals, yeah most corporations have no idea what morals are, and some might say that’s their right as a company to just focus on money, damn everyone and everything else, your health, the environment not if it interferes with my corporations profit margin.
Social contract what’s that about.
If it makes you feel any better, all brands had illegally high emissions. People only tie it to VW so much because they were the first to be tested, and they owned up to it, meaning media could call them out on it without fear of libel.
VW wasn’t even close to the worst offender.
They only owned up after lying and obfuscating for years. California said they work with manufacturers when they are out of compliance, but brought their lawsuit because VW wouldn’t cooperate
Even without diselgate vw group cars are just poorly engineered rebadges. If not dieselgate, jail them for the hitler engine.
This is the way.
No, this is the way. But the above article is a good start.
I would love to see counterarguments to this instead of just downvotes
I mean my own counterargument to it as that no state should have the power to execute people, and if it should it shouldn’t use it on criminals, and if it should it shouldn’t use it on financial crimes. Yeah $12bil is a lot, and I am absolutely in favor of hard time as a punishment for financial crimes, but I don’t think seriously think anyone should die over it.
no state should have the power to execute people
I would present a counterargument to that, as all states in the world ultimately have this power, only the circumstances differ. I mean, grab a gun and try to shoot at armed police anywhere in the world. You will be killed, and nobody can sue the state or the police who shot you for unjustly executing you. Killing you is always fair to protect other people from being killed.
From there, we are arguing whether states should be able to kill in cold blood, which is a different conversation, and my opinion is that we should keep making penalties for “financial crimes”, which usually kill more people than any mass shooter or serial killer could, harsher and harsher until there is a clearly visible deterrent effect.
The case of the lady in Vietnam is not even a direct “cold blood” case by the way, as the state agreed to spare her if she puts at least most of the money back, which means that lives lost because of the absence of that money might be spared. In my view, this is analogous to shooting at an active shooter, and an okay thing to do. Lives are being saved by doing this.
I was making an argument about should, not does, and executing people is rather different than shooting someone in defense of yourself/others.
I agree that financial crimes should have harsh penalties, just not death. The problem is that we don’t generally apply penalties to this type of crime at all; fining a company $500mil after they made $40bil or whatever by circumventing laws/regulations is not a penalty, it’s the cost of doing business.
Anyone have a link without the anti GDRP cookie trackers?
content itself https://lemmy.world/post/30292632/17298348
Thanks!
The fallout forced CEO Martin Winterkorn to resign, although he denied wrongdoing. U.S. authorities issued an arrest warrant for Winterkorn in 2018, but Germany does not extradite its nationals. His trial in Germany was paused in 2021 due to health issues, but he remains a key figure under investigation.
Rich people going to jail what fantasy is this. And i can i live there
It’s amazing what you can find if you don’t just look at memes - https://www.forbes.com.au/news/billionaires/billionaires-behind-bars/
It took 10 years? Well even longer because they figured something was wrong before it came public.
The court sent the former head of diesel engine development behind bars for four years and six months, and the former head of powertrain electronics to two years and seven months.
It took 10 years?
This was my first thought as well.
Gefängnisvergnügen
