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He is the last of the four defendants to arrive. With brisk steps, Rupert Stadler makes his way through the anteroom to the high-security underground courtroom in Munich-Stadelheim, right next to the long walls of the prison, behind his lawyers. The waiting journalists pause briefly. Not only because of the corona mask, blue disposable face mask model, Stadler is not immediately recognizable. Gray hair, otherwise neatly trimmed, falls on his forehead. He wears a white shirt under a dark blue suit, nothing has changed.
Stadler takes a seat on the bench – second row in the middle, framed by his lawyers Thilo Pfordte and Ulrike Thole – and removes his mask. The face has become a little narrower. The monotonous minute-long click of digital cameras pointed at him allows Stadler to hold on while sitting. Then the photographers leave the room. 20 journalists and spectators, held at a crown distance by red and white duct tape, can stand in the bright-paneled room, daylight falling through the barred ceiling windows.
Stadler, 57, takes the stage of the first criminal case for the diesel scandal on German soil. A scandal that shook the German automotive republic and continues to impact today. If VW, Daimler and BMW are desperately fighting the stigmatization of internal combustion engines and fighting for their place in the new world of mobility, this is not only because of Elon Musk and “Fridays for Future”, but also because of their own sins of the past.
On September 18, 2015, US environmental authorities accused Audi’s parent company VW of having adhered to limit values for the emission of toxic nitrogen oxides for years only with the help of manipulated engines. On the test bench, which is decisive for homologation, diesel vehicles complied with the standard; on the road they exceeded the admissible values many times because sophisticated mechanisms stopped the cleaning of the exhaust gases.
The important components of the E189 fraud engine exposed by the Americans had been developed at Audi years before. Since the scandal broke, the slogan “Vorsprung durch Technik”, with which the luxury brand celebrated long successes, has had a cynical tone. Audi is now considered the core of the diesel fraud, but it took more than a year before investigations in Germany were also directed against Audi. Then, however, prosecutors proceeded even more massively because they soon suspected that Audi’s leadership around Stadler was not clearing up, but was knowingly selling more rigged cars. The indictment was filed in July 2019 and is now going to court.
Hundreds of thousands of drivers may have been waiting for this moment
Many have been waiting for this moment for five years: hundreds of thousands of drivers whose cars have been tampered with with fraudulent software and therefore may be worth less today; Employees of Audi and other corporations involved in the scandal who feel that their employer has betrayed them; prosecutors around Chief Investigator Dominik Kieninger, who for years investigated and identified more than 40 suspects at Audi alone; Presiding Judge Stefan Weickert, who only moved to the head of the 5th Chamber of the Munich II Regional Court, responsible for commercial criminal matters, and who immediately brought one of the most notorious proceedings of recent decades to the table; and last but not least, the four defendants and their attorneys.
Judge Weickert presents the four men, two on his right, two in front of him, each of the defendants has a row to himself. Weickert considers himself determined and straightforward. Speak fast, often ending sentences with an interrogative “jaa”. It starts with the engineers and ends with Stadler.
Deep fall
Stadler sits across from Weickert, though at a distance of about thirty feet. For four and a half months he was detained in the Augsburg-Gablingen prison. A deep drop for the manager. He grew up on a farm not far from Ingolstadt, studied business administration, joined Audi in 1990, became assistant to VW Patriarch Ferdinand Piëch, rose to the top of the Audi team in 2007; Entrepreneur one year, CEO another year, honorary professor and honorary senator, awarded the Bavarian Order of Merit, and now Stadelheim.
Stadler is accused of having been informed a few days after the VW scandal that Audi engines also contained illegal shutoff devices for cleaning exhaust gases. Since then it has not been able to stop production and clarify the matter. Stadler has denied all of this so far. His lawyer Pfordte filed an application early on, he wanted to know from the judges if any of them used a car that was equipped with an Audi diesel engine between 2009 and 2020. That could be a reason to be biased in the process.
Ahead of Stadler is 61-year-old Wolfgang Hatz, once a star in the VW universe, since 2001, head of engine development at Audi. In 2007, then-Audi boss Martin Winterkorn brought his confidant Hatz to Wolfsburg, Winterkorn became VW boss and Hatz was in charge of engine development for the entire group.
Hatz spent nine months in custody, more than anyone else, suffered a disc slip and his lawyers fought a fierce battle with the prosecutor. Freiburg defense lawyer Gerson Trüg, who also sits next to him in court, wrote lengthy arguments in the year between the indictment and the start of the trial, explaining why Hatz was innocent. In essence: It was only after Hatz switched to VW that the alleged fraud at Audi started, he didn’t know anything about it.
The two men sitting to the right of the judge in the high security courtroom told the prosecutor a different story and want to do the same in court.
There is the engineer L., of all the defendants anchored lowest in the hierarchy of Audi, headed the subdepartment of “After-treatment of exhaust gases”. L., 52, unpacked and put a heavy load on Hatz and other managers under the dash. He just complied, and in his post he couldn’t have decided what technology would be incorporated into the engines and whether the laws would be ignored. Investigators Say: Anyone who wants to understand how the fraud technically occurred needs to speak to L.
Or with Zaccheo Giovanni Pamio. The 63-year-old Italian, in a dark gray brush cut, dove blue suit, sits as L. diagonally across from Hatz and Stadler. Pamio headed the “Thermodynamics, OBD, Exhaust Aftertreatment” department, which means she was one floor up from L in the hierarchy. There is a video on the Internet in which Pamio stands on the street in an American neighborhood and declares the “cleanest diesel in the world.”
Like Hatz, Pamio once worked at Fiat, and then the two worked closely at Audi for years. Their good relationship was broken due to the diesel scandal. As L. Pamio confessed and overloaded Hatz. Over and over again he testified against Hatz during the four months he was detained in Stadelheim, where shortly afterwards Hatz was also given a cell and where the two meet for the first time. They hardly look at each other.
In the indictment: How Hatz, Pamio and L. are supposed to have implemented the manipulation
In procedural circles, the four defendants are said to have wanted to comment personally on the allegations made against them in the first weeks of the trial. But now prosecutors Dominik Kieninger and Christian Schuster have the floor, alternately reading the indictment.
Even when Kieninger presented the hierarchies and development of the departments involved in the alleged fraud, it was already clear how complex the issue is to be negotiated here for the next two years.
There is talk of oxidative and NOx reducing degradation mechanisms, chemical processes and formulas. SCR catalysts, an acoustic function and AdBlue, the urea mixture for cleaning the exhaust gases, of which the car managers wanted as little as possible in the tank.
Technology was never Stadler’s world
As the prosecutor explains the complexities of technologies to reduce emissions, page by page, Stadler briefly removes his glasses and runs his hand over his eyes and face. Technology was never his world, he is a business economist, a salesman. Hatz, the motorcyclist who is said to have personally vouched for the success of the “Clean Diesel Campaign” with CEO Martin Winterkorn, leans sometimes to the left and sometimes to the right toward his advocates and comments on the technical conference, occasionally shaking it. Head. Pamio, for whom an interpreter translates the lecture, and L. follow the impassive reading.
After almost an hour of reading, the prosecutor Schuster takes over and begins to describe in detail the manipulation strategies, from A to F. He reads long tables of the affected Audi models, their engines and the fraud techniques used. And finally explains how Hatz, Pamio and L. are supposed to implement the manipulation. The phrase that is often quoted from an engineer email is that you won’t make it without shitting. That is, to make the incompatible compatible, to comply with all the supposed requests of the clients and at the same time comply with the emission standards.
Only at the end, in the last part of the 92-page indictment, will the afternoon be dealt with about Rupert Stadler’s contribution to the crime. Unlike the other defendants, it is said that he did not actively participate in the manipulation, but did not properly clarify and, against his better judgment, did not prevent the sale of manipulated vehicles in Europe from the fall of 2015. Therefore , your sentence should be light and you can be saved from jail.
The Winterkorn case is still pending
However, the focus is likely to be on Stadler in the coming months. Until another manager is likely to attract even more attention next year: former VW boss Martin Winterkorn. Probably in the spring of 2021, Winterkorn and other members of VW’s former management team in Braunschweig will have to face a process due to their role in the diesel affair. The Brunswick judges will have little respect for prominent figures of the accused.
In the Winterkorn case, the Braunschweig Regional Court is even investigating the suspicion of whether the former CEO learned of the manipulation earlier than the prosecutor suspects. Rather than not until 2014, as the investigators surmise, Winterkorn may have learned of the fraud as early as the summer of 2012; the court sees at least evidence of this.
Two former VW technicians want to have reported the illegal deactivation device internally at the time. The sensitive information is said to have passed on to a close Winterkorn confidant. The court now wants to verify if the informant passed the information to Winterkorn at the time. If the initial suspicion were confirmed, the VW Group’s previous line of defense would eventually become obsolete: For years, Volkswagen has been claiming that suspected fraud did not reach the level of the executive board until the summer of 2015.
The former VW boss denies all the allegations.
Collaboration: Simon Hage
