A former Volkswagen executive will plead guilty to charges connected to last year’s fuel emission scandal, according to court documents.
Oliver Schmidt, the German automaker’s former emissions compliance official, plans to plead guilty during an Aug. 4 hearing in the U.S. District Court in Detroit. He was charged in 2016 with conspiracy to defraud the U.S. and violating the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Air Act.
Schmidt was one of several VW executives charged in a 10-year conspiracy to dupe regulators on the environmental quality of its diesel vehicles. The company also agreed to a $4.3 billion settlement in January, putting an end to the more than year-long investigations into the German automaker’s diesel emissions cheating.
VW will pay a $1.5-billion civil fine and $2.8-billion criminal fine, which would have been stiffer had the company refused to spend more than $11 billion to fix or buyback the nearly 500,000 tainted vehicles.
VW admitted in September 2015 to installing so-called defeat devices in hundreds of thousands of diesel-powered vehicles in the U.S. The devices would only kick on during road conditions when emission measuring tools were not engaged.
The scandal will eventually cost the German automaker more than $15 billion, $10 billion of which will go to the owners of the tainted vehicles, while another $2.7 billion will go to a mitigation project. VW will plow another $2 billion investment into electric vehicle technology, which will be distributed within the next decade.
The mitigation could be altered thanks to a recent change in how third-party mitigation policies operate.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions ended the practice known as “third party settlements” in June, forcing companies that violated clean air regulations to pay groups and people not associated with the criminal matter.
Restitution funds should go to victims of a crime, “not to bankroll third-party special interest groups or the political friends of whoever is in power,” Sessions told reporters at the time.
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