Regulator's aren't stupid enough to be fooled by a couple of junior engineers being offered up as a sacrifice. They'll definitely go after the highest-level people they can get.
Maybe in a just world. I don't hold out too much hope.
Two men are named in the article. One is on the Audi board of management. The other is on the Porsche board of management.
I understand where the cynicism comes from, I really do, but it's exhausting to wade through all the uninformed naysaying in this discussion. The above information took me less than a minute to find.
I read this as an exec saying: "Just get it done. I don't care how it's done, and I don't want to know how it's done, just do it."
May have watched too many movies, but whatever is more plausible is usually correct.
I can't imagine something this important not having to go through multiple people for inspection. So of those people that are saying they "don't know", though it may be true, for some of them it was their job to know, I think that should (and probably is) being taken into account in the investigations.
If they knew about it, they were wrong. If the didn't know about it, they were derelict/incompetent in their duty to supervise, AKA, wrong.
> In the case of Deepwater Horizon, BP didn't make the decisions that lead to the blowout, but created excessive pressure for cost-cutting.
Oil drilling operations are very much different from any other company structure/hierarchy you are probably familiar with. BP's "Company Man" (Jobsite supervisor) made those decisions and BP gets to own the consequences. BP also made a lot of other poor decisions along the way, and afterward, which are also their responsibility. None of the parties comes out of the DWH disaster looking good, but BP gets primary responsibility, and they earned it.
When you're audited, have fun claiming you didn't know that you were committing tax evasion.
Try buying something for a ridiculously low price down the pub. When the police come to take the stolen goods away, try claiming you didn't realise something selling for a tenth of its value was stolen.
Knowledge of the act, not knowledge of the law. There are very few contexts in which you can be punished for not knowing an illegal act took place, and they are all situations where you should have known but were negligent.
>'When troops commit massacres and atrocities against the civilian population of occupied territory or against prisoners of war, the responsibility may rest not only with the actual perpetrators but also with the commander. Such a responsibility arises directly when the acts in question have been committed in pursuance of an order of the commander concerned. The commander is also responsible if he has actual knowledge, or should have knowledge, through reports received by h'un or through other means, that troops or other persons subject to his control are about to commit or have committed a war crime and he fails to take the necessary and reasonable steps to insure compliance with the law of war or to punish violators thereof.'
The basic principle is liar's reports are worthless. When reporters want to create a particular outcome (no executives should do hard time), what you end up with is fundamentally dishonest. And since we have reasonable doubts about the integrity of the investigation -- it's being performed by employees of the original deceivers -- the whole thing is garbage. You can't take it and unshade it a little bit; people who have proved their untrustworthiness simply cannot be trusted. Not just a little bit; not at all.
ps -- what constitutes a believable report? One done by criminal investigative services belonging to a country where the government doesn't own a major stake in the company being investigated.
There are a lot of different ways that this type of cheating can develop over time, and simply saying "lots of people knew must have known about this" isn't very satisfying to me.
There are plenty of ways that upper management can stay in the dark. In the case of Deepwater Horizon, BP didn't make the decisions that lead to the blowout, but created excessive pressure for cost-cutting. In the case of Barings Bank, the managers were genuinely unaware of the rogue trader's fraud, but allowed him to bypass internal controls.
There are important lessons that will come out of the VW case and I'm very interested to learn them. The dismissiveness of the comments here is really disappointing, on the other hand.