Investigators uncovered internal company emails that show Liang and other VW engineers exchanged ideas about how to “effectively calibrate the defeat device” so that the cars would recognize when they were undergoing US emissions testing.
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“This will certainly have an impact on proceedings in Europe”, said Christopher Rother, a Berlin attorney representing European plaintiffs suing Volkswagen in Germany.
As described in a 25-page indictment unsealed Friday along with the plea deal, Mr. Liang and his co-conspirators at Volkswagen knew “from nearly the beginning of VW’s process to design its new “clean diesel” vehicles” that the cars “would not meet USA emissions standards”.
Between 1983 and 2008 Liang worked in VW’s diesel development department in Wolfsburg, Germany.
In 2006, he and his co-conspirators started work on a new diesel engine for US vehicles, the plea agreement says.
The indictment said Liang and others consistently misrepresented the system to federal and state environmental regulators and lied about the issue when regulators probed the discrepancy between the cars’ testing and real-world emissions performance.
According to the indictment, Liang was copied on a June 2015 email, with the subject line “C$3 ARB Status”, in which a VW employee wrote, in German, “We must be sure to prevent the authority from testing the Gen1”, referring to the first-generation EA 189 engine. After the court hearing, Liang’s lawyer, Daniel Nixon, said his client was “very remorseful”.
The Justice Department past year publicly stepped up efforts to charge individuals in corporate investigations, after facing criticism that it heavily penalized firms for corporate wrongdoing but prosecuted few executives for the same conduct.
Liang is expected to be sentenced in January. The word conspiracy has been mentioned several times, which suggests Liang did not work alone. But prosecutors say that Liang and his VW colleagues still conspired to hide the existence of the defeat devices.
The Volkswagen employees misled regulators at the Environmental Protection Agency and the California Air Resources Board about testing results and tried to blame “innocent mechanical and technological problems”, according to the indictment.
“We “only just need a plausible explanation” as to why the emissions are still high!” a VW employee wrote to Liang and others in German after the software patch provided by VW failed to fix the problem.
VW still faces lawsuits by at least five states and by investors and dealerships in the US.
Liang worked on the defeat device from November 2006, moving to the United States in 2008 as Volkswagen ramped up its marketing of “clean diesel” cars with high fuel efficiency in an effort to win greater market share in the US.
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In June, the company agreed to a separate civil settlement paying regulators and consumers up to $15 billion. In August, the automaker reached a tentative settlement with 650 dealers worth about $1.2 billion. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he was 63, and the headline described him as a former Volkswagen engineer.
