Compliance Perspectives: Volkswagen's Transformation
Daily Compliance News: March 3, 2020, the Devil’s Advocate edition
Compliance into the Weeds-Episode 62, Sentencing of VW Employee Oliver Schmidt
Day 20: What Does Innovation in Compliance Look Like?
Prorogate this, Boris. In an “unprecedented” ruling, the UK’s supreme court deemed the Prime Minister’s Brexit-driven suspension of Parliament “unlawful, void and of no effect” this morning and called on the body to reconvene...more
Former Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn is facing aggravated fraud charges from German prosecutors for his leadership of the automaker “when it deceived regulators about its vehicles’ diesel exhaust levels.” The criminal...more
In January 2019, the US Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan returned an indictment against four executives from Audi, a Volkswagen subsidiary, for their participation and direction of Audi’s emissions-cheating...more
In order to comply with European antitrust rulings against it earlier this year, Google announced that for the first time it will begin charging telephone handset manufacturers to install Gmail, Google Maps, and other popular...more
Markets took a beating yesterday, with investors apparently put off by tech stocks, tensions with China, a recent jump in interest rates and government bond yields, and a tightening Fed monetary policy....more
China is answering the White House’s latest tariff announcement with another $60 billion in levies on US goods of its own....more
We all know the saying – A fish rots from the head. Sometimes a clear and simple statement says it all. The Volkswagen diesel emissions cheating scandal is yet another example of C-Suite, even CEO, misconduct....more
The DOJ has charged former VW chief exec Martin Winterkorn (and 5 others) with conspiring to defraud the US government in Volkswagen’s “yearslong effort to rig its diesel vehicles to feign compliance with federal emissions...more
The notoriously close-to-the-vest Amazon revealed for the first time yesterday in a letter to shareholders that its popular Prime program boasts more than 100 million paid members globally....more
The compliance community is well aware of the risks in the C-Suite. As you move up the corporate ladder, the level of risk from executive misconduct increases. A rotten executive can quickly bring down a company, destroy...more
ECB Chief Mario Draghi’s having none of the US Treasury Secretary’s recent weak-dollar talk, accusing the US official, in not so many words, of “violating agreements among nations against starting currency wars”....more
The latest on the potential Disney move for “significant parts of 21st Century Fox,” which is nearing completion and could see Murdoch scion leaving his father and brother in order to work for Big Mouse....more
A Volkswagen manager pleaded guilty to conspiracy and violating the Clean Air Act and could get seven years in prison. A Volkswagen engineer who agreed to testify against the Volkswagen manager was sentenced to three years in...more
We are fascinated by corporate scandals. Since the 1980s, the US public has enjoyed unraveling corporate scandals, and vilifying corporate leaders caught in the web of deceit and misconduct. I am sure there are historical...more
Just when you thought it could not get any worse, events remind us that things actually can get worse. Volkswagen suffered through a horrible scandal involving an elaborate scheme to circumvent emissions regulations. The...more
The Justice Department’s continuing lack of individual criminal prosecutions in the FCPA arena continues to raise serious questions. DOJ’s issuance of the Yates memorandum was seen as a new and important reiteration of DOJ’s...more
Hoping to reverse recent years of struggles, J. Crew is bidding farewell to CEO Mickey Drexler (though he’ll stay on as chairman) in favor of West Elm’s James Brett....more
The struggle to attract and retain businesses and the jobs they provide has increasingly led to states and cities squaring off against others, with competing tax incentive packages the very real currency of the battle....more
Ex-VW-Chairman Ferdinand Piech has thrown a wrench in the automaker’s official narrative of the emissions cheating scandal by suggesting, in sworn testimony, that the company knew of the cheating months before it was...more
The CFPB has ordered UniRush (purveyor of the RushCard prepaid debit card) and its payment processor, MasterCard, to fork over $13 million in fines after a breakdown last year that blocked thousands of customers from...more
As we look across the corporate governance landscape and focus on the spikes of corporate scandals, I started to wonder if there was any pattern or trend to the nature of corporate scandals....more
Just when we thought 2016 was over and we could all breathe a sigh of relief, DOJ and the SEC have continued to run with a string of new enforcement actions. To all of those prognosticators, paparazzi, commentators, chicken...more
When unraveling a major corporate scandal, especially multi-year schemes involving senior executives, the blame game or lessons learned approach can easily turn into a fruitless exercise. The VA and Takata scandals are...more
One of three counts in Volkswagen’s recent $4.3 billion guilty-plea was for obstruction of justice arising from a litigation-hold botched by house counsel. As VW prepared to admit the defeat-device problems to US...more
The headlines generated by the Volkswagen emissions scandal continue to amaze the environmental community and the general public, both here and abroad. The events are shocking in part because they involve a household name in...more