First, it's piling another crime onto all the other crimes.
Second, any such agreement, by nature of being illegal, would be unenforceable. Even if he has already collected on it, the company would be required to demand the money back if the deal is ever discovered. Yet if he had somehow managed to hide the money out of the company's reach, he would have been in a position to renege on the deal.
TL/DR: don't make illegal deals with criminals who are smart enough to understand the prisoners' dilemma.
Unless the CEO personally ordered it (which seems unlikely), someone somewhere below the CEO ordered this. You will eventually find someone down the chain who cannot identify a superior that pressured them to do it.
That in no way implies he's covering for superiors out of loyalty to VW.
Looks like in his own mind his only crime was being loyal to a corrupt foreman. Classically German.
> “A script, or talking points, I was directed to follow for that meeting was approved by management level supervisors at VW, including a high-ranking in-house lawyer, ” he said in the letter. “Regrettably, I agreed to follow it.”
None of that implies he was ordered to lie to regulators. It says he concealed software and followed a script, not that the people who wrote or approved the script knew he would be lying to regulators by following that script, or that he was concealing software.
> Mr. Schmidt did not identify any Volkswagen superiors who might have pressured him to lie to regulators.
I think the point here is refusal to co-operate with prosecutors. They wanted to know who at Volkswagen told him to lie, and they would have been happy to let him off the hook if he co-operated. He refused, essentially continuing to demonstrate his loyalty to VW and thus perpetuating his complicity in the criminal justice process of the very crime he was now convicted of. He failed to demonstrative effective repentance, and now must serve as warning example to other white collar criminals.