I doubt anyone will do jail time for this, if even any laws were broken. And if Porsche settles for the maximum 1 million Euro fine, that's not even 1/1000th of the profits they made on the backs of the shorts. It's not like their aspiration to takeover VW was any kind of a secret in either the auto or finance worlds.

Frankly, I have no sympathy for market speculators who got reamed here by shorting VW. I do have some sympathy for people who were short the DAX index as a broad-based hedging strategy and got trapped by the leap in the DAX. Then again, "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" is a true today as it was 75 years ago.