Volkswagen Hires Top Anti-Corruption Executive as it Deals with Scandal

MANILA: Volkswagen is hiring a top anti-corruption executive manager from competitor Daimler as it prepares to clean up the scandal over cheating on U.S. diesel emissions tests. The company revealed that it would hire lawyer Christine Hohmann-Dennhardt for the role of an executive who will handle legal affairs. Hohmann-Dennhardt, 65, served as the judge on Germany's Federal Constitutional Court and as justice minister in the state of Hesse in southwestern Germany, before joining Daimler. However, Daimler agreed to release her from contract as compliance executive in the interests of good corporate governance.

Naming a compliance executive was a step taken by Daimler AG and German industrial equipment maker Siemens after bribery scandals at those companies. The companies tried to put a dedicated and responsible person at the top level of management. Officially, CEO and the chief financial officer run the top management board in German corporations.

According to U.S. Officials, Volkswagen AG installed a software on 482,000 diesel engine cars to disable emission controls and later on, it violated the US emission regulations. The company has decided to recall 2.4 million 2009-2015 model year cars with the cheat software in Germany and 8.5 million cars across Europe.

German prosecutors investigating Volkswagen's scandal said that they're assigning a special team of detectives to evaluate and authenticate the massive amount of data seized from the automaker.

Meanwhile, Braunschweig prosecutors' spokesman Klaus Ziehe said that the state police has assigned 20 investigators to work with his office. Ziehe says, “We're talking terabytes, not gigabytes, and certainly many cartons of paper,” said Ziehe. A terabyte, a unit of digital information, is about 1,000 gigabytes. Ziehe has also confirmed that the number of suspects is “more than two but at the moment a lot fewer than 10.”