A former director of the German luxury car manufacturers Audi and Porsche, subsidiaries of car group Volkswagen, pleaded guilty to installing cheating software during a court case in Germany about ‘dieselgate’ on Tuesday.
The former director, Wolfgang Hatz, had denied the facts but pleaded guilty on Tuesday to receive a reduced sentence under an agreement with the court. He and two other employees installed the banned software, said the man’s lawyer before the court in Munich.
The main defendant in the trial, which started 2.5 years ago and is the first criminal procedure into the dieselgate affair in Germany, is former Audi CEO Rupert Stadler (60). So far, he denies all responsibility for the case of cheating software that was built into diesel cars.
Judge Stefan Weickert labelled Hatz’s confession “a turning point” in the trial. For Hatz, the court and the defence now want a suspended prison sentence of 18 to 24 months and a fine of 400,000 euros, but the public prosecutor is still opposed to this, given the lateness of the confessions.
The German car giant Volkswagen admitted in September 2015 that it had installed cheating software in some eleven million diesel cars of the group, as a result of which the cars recorded better emission values under test conditions than during real use on the road.