Quote:
"Volkswagen obfuscated, they denied, and they ultimately lied."
These were the words of the US Attorney General Loretta Lynch, as she set out how the German carmaker would be punished for attempting to hoodwink the US authorities over the emissions produced by its diesel cars.
It has been a tough week for Volkswagen.
It has been fined $4.3bn, agreed to plead guilty to criminal charges - and six executives are facing charges. One of them, Oliver Schmidt, has spent the past few days in a Miami jail. Others may yet find themselves in the firing line.
But because of this, we now have a very clear idea not only of what Volkswagen was doing wrong, and how it went about it, but also the measures that were taken to conceal that wrongdoing.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38603723
More detail about how VW went about their subterfuge.
I bet there's more than a few squeaky bottoms amongst the ranks of the car industry's executives because if this was down to the difficulty of meeting the ever more onerous emissions standards at a realistic cost, how many other diesel manufacturers may have done the same thing and what about those who may have suffered because they didn't go down that route?
VW evidently cheated their way to market share and in so doing may have put other honest manufacturers at a huge competitive disadvantage. I wonder if they'll take legal action too.