Volkswagen engineer James Robert Liang pleaded guilty to criminal charges Friday for his role in the almost 10-year diesel-emissions cheating fiasco and will cooperate with the government in its ongoing investigation of the automaker’s alleged conspiracy to defraud US regulators and USA customers, the Justice Department said.
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In a court appearance in Detroit Friday, former Volkswagen engineer James Liang pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit fraud against USA regulators and customers.
The carmaker has already set aside $16.5bn (£12.5bn) to address environmental, state and owner claims in America.
To compensate, Liang admitted they rigged software to manipulate the results of emissions testing in 475,000 cars with 2-liter diesel engines in the United States with “defeat device” created to detect when the vehicle was undergoing official emissions testing and turn full emissions controls on only during the tests.
In June, the company announced they had settled emissions-cheating cases for over $15 billion, and would spend over $10 billion to either buy back or fix about 475,000 vehicles with the 2-liter diesel engines.
VW declined to comment on the plea but said that it continues to co-operate with the US Justice Department in the investigation.
Liang and other VW employees developed a complex software system to keep emissions low when a vehicle was undergoing testing to demonstrate environmental compliance, but to allow them to spew higher emissions on the road, the indictment said.
Liang directly contributed to Volkswagen rigging more than 10 million vehicles to cheat on emissions tests which resulted in billions of dollars of fines the company was forced to pay. After coming to the U.S., Liang became the head of the automaker’s America-based Diesel Competence unit-a position which saw him reporting regularly to his colleagues back in Germany, prosecutors said.
Liang reportedly expressed remorse to the court. Liang will return to court to be sentenced on January 11.
Autotrader senior analyst Michelle Krebs scanned several recent headlines, which included a Volkswagen engineer pleading guilty for his role in a conspiracy to cheat USA emissions tests as well as Wells Fargo agreeing to a record fine from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. During this time, Volkswagen continued to advertise its vehicles in the U.S.as “clean diesel” and “environmentally friendly”.
The US Justice Department has brought the first criminal charges against a Volkswagen executive over the diesel emissions scandal. He was part of the team that developed the EA 189 2.0-liter diesel TDI engine used in several VW models included in the investigation.
According to the plea agreement, from 1983 until May 2008, Liang was an employee of Volkswagen, working in its diesel development department in Wolfsburg, Germany. He is now expected to help the government target other VW employees involved in the scam. Liang and others attempted to blame the excess emissions on “innocent mechanical and technological problems” while “secretly knowing” that the cheat software was the culprit, according to the indictment.
Mr Liang was a key part of VW’s efforts to quell regulators’ concerns about the vehicles following a 2014 study that identified discrepancies between the cars’ emissions in lab tests compared with their actual road performance.
Emails presented in court show a concerted and deliberate effort to cheat US regulators, with one email between Liang and a coworker saying, “If this goes through without problems, the function is probably truly watertight!”
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Liang is cooperating with authorities in the USA, where he has lived since 2008.
