DETROIT/WASHINGTON A Volkswagen AG engineer pleaded guilty on Friday to helping the German automaker evade US emission standards, and his lawyer said he would cooperate with federal authorities in their criminal probe.
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The first U.S. criminal charge over the Volkswagen emissions scandal has been filed.
James Robert Liang, 62, of Newberry Park, California, entered the plea Friday in U.S. District Court in Detroit to one count of conspiracy to defraud the government through wire fraud.
He faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000, or twice the gross gain or loss.
James Liang helped develop emissions test-cheating software.
A Volkswagen engineer pleaded guilty to helping the auto maker’s admitted efforts to cheat on emissions tests, becoming the first person criminally convicted in the U.S.in a wide-ranging scandal that has cost the German giant billions of dollars.
LIANG and his co-conspirators referred to the defeat device software as, among other things, the “acoustic function”, “switch logic”, “cycle beating” software, or “emissions-tight mode.”
James Liang, 62, was the first person charged in the US investigation, the Justice Department said. Deputy Chief Benjamin D. Singer and Trial Attorney Alison L. Anderson of the Criminal Division’s Fraud Section, Trial Attorney Jennifer L. Blackwell of the Environment and Natural Resources Division, and Criminal Division Chief Mark Chutkow and Economic Crimes Unit Chief John K. Neal of the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Eastern District of MI are prosecuting the case. While working at VW’s testing facility in Oxnard, CA, he has held the title of leader of diesel competence.
That would allow the company to escape criminal conviction as long as it complies with certain requirements in a deal with the justice department.
The scandal blew up after an investigation found that many Volkswagen cars being sold in America had software in diesel engines that could detect when they were being tested.
The day before the Volkswagen scandal erupted previous year, General Motors admitted to criminal wrongdoing and agreed to pay a $900 million penalty for mishandling a defective ignition switch.
For a little background, here is a timeline of Volkswagen’s emissions scandal. In June, VW agreed to pay $15 billion to settle customer and government lawsuits in the US, including spending up to $10 billion to buy back or fix the cheating diesels.
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. And when it couldn’t make the numbers work Liang and his team turned to subterfuge. Liang had been indicted by a grand jury on charges of conspiring to commit fraud.
He was directly involved in creating the so-called defeat device which was set up to disguise how much the vehicles really polluted.
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Liang transferred in 2008 from Volkswagen headquarters in Germany to the U.S.to help oversee the launch of the new “clean diesel” models. The Gen 1 was a new diesel engine for the US market, and CARB is the California Air Resources Board.
