Volkswagen AG (VLKAY) shares closed Monday’s trading session down 2.06% to $28.57 as almost 300 institutional investors in Germany have filed a $3.61 billion lawsuit against the German carmaker over the emissions scandal, Reuters reports.
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VW, which until recently entertained ambitions of becoming the world’s biggest carmaker, has been plunged into its deepest-ever crisis by revelations last September that it installed emissions-cheating software into 11 million diesel engines worldwide. A German spokesman for Volkswagen said: “These are legal proceedings concerning labor law on which we don’t comment as a matter of principle”.
The lawyers in charge said the goal is to determine whether Volkswagen neglected its duty to the capital markets regarding the timeframe between June 2008 and September 18th, 2015.
Volkswagen has said, in prior suits, its reactions and warnings were timely and in accordance with rules. The scandal led to CEO Martin Winterkorn’s resignation, a U.S. Department of Justice criminal investigation, massive losses and potential fines of up to $20 billion.
Because Volkswagen has refused to take part in settlement negotiations and won’t waive a statute of limitations defence, it was necessary to file the lawsuit, Tilp said.
Shares of Volkswagen stock have fallen 16 percent this year. The company has apologized and said it will fix the cars.
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Among the plaintiffs in the new Volkswagen case are investors from Taiwan, Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, France, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the US. These groups include 17 German investment management companies as well as insurance companies and the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, one of the largest pension funds in the US, Tilp said. Instead, a court will often single out a case as a kind of pilot case and apply the ruling in that trial to other parties, provided that they filed their claim before the ruling in the pilot trial.
