UK Edition
Full scale of VW's 'dieselgate' deceit may never be known, car maker tells MPs
The full extent of the deception at Volkswagen over “dieselgate” may never be publicly revealed, the car maker has said.
The admission, in a letter to MPs, comes despite the company taking on global law firm Jones Day to run a massive investigation into the scandal to discover how high up it went in the German industrial giant.
VW pledged to leave no stone unturned when it launched the probe in late 2015, shortly after it emerged that the car maker had used “defeat devices” to cheat emission tests on 11m cars worldwide.
The company said that 450 legal staff were working on the investigation examining 100 terabytes of material - the equivalent of 50m books.
But Paul Willis, UK boss of the VW, has confirmed to MPs that there is “no written Jones Day ‘report’”. Instead the results of the huge probe fed into a 29-page document released by the Department of Justice (DoJ) in the US, where the scandal first emerged, and where VW has agreed to pay billions in penalties to settle legal claims.
This document is all that is available, meaning that it may never be fully known who knew what and when about the scandal, which saw cars pump out up to 40 times the amount of permitted pollution when on the roads.
Mr Willis wrote to MPs on the Transport Select Committee to clarify his replies to their questions after an angry evidence hearing on the scandal held in February.
MPs questioned his claim that there was no written report and later raised doubts about the “credibility” of his answers, claiming some were “incomplete, intended to mislead and may have fallen short of the truth”.
In a letter Mr Willis wrote to the committee to clarify his evidence, dated March 24 but released a week later, the VW boss said he “dismissed entirely suggestions my evidence was intended to mislead or was ‘short of the truth’”.
He added that he had “no involvement with anyone at Jones Day or any aspect of their investigation” and said that the DoJ decided on what findings were to be published.
Mr Willis also apologised for his “initial understanding that there was a separate report.... which turned out not to be the case”.
Louise Ellman, chair of the select committee, said that she was “disappointed that Mr Willis’s responses raise further questions” adding that she would be asking VW chairman Dieter Pötsch to provide “further clarity”.
VW drivers in the UK who have yet win compensation for the scandal - unlike those in the US - were also given hope by Ms Ellman. She said she was pressing the Department for Transport for action to deliver redress for them.
So far VW has implemented a modification on about 540,000 of the 1m affected cars in the UK to eliminate the "cheat" in their engines, even though it maintains it has done nothing wrong in Britain. As a result it insists that affected VW owners in the UK are not eligible for compensation.
The full findings of Jones Day's investigation will come out, said law firm Harcus Sinclair, which is representing 35,000 VW owners in a legal claim seeking compensation.
Lawyer Damon Parker, who is heading the action, said: "UK car owners have no choice but to take legal action. They are not only seeking compensation from VW but want to hold the world's largest car manufacturer to account and we will find out who knew what when through our courts.
"VW is not above the law and by taking legal action, UK consumers are sending that message loud and clear."