A US District judge in Detroit has sentenced Oliver Schmidt, a former Volkswagen executive, to seven years in prison for his role in the Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal of 2015.
Schmidt was told to write a cheque for $400,000 as a fine. All this represents the maximum sentence that Schmidt could have received under the plea deal he signed in August.
However, the whole thing stinks. Schmidt was an emissions compliance executive for VW, and while he was no doubt involved in the scandal, he was by no means the instigator, but appears to have been made the scapegoat. German coppers have arrested Wolfgang Hatz who was the head of VW engine development. But it is incredibly unlikely that two men operated alone and without the nod of people further up the food chain.
Schmidt also wrote a letter to the judge, which surfaced over the weekend, in which the executive said he felt ?misused? by his own company and claimed that higher-ranked VW executives coached him on a script to help him lie to a California Air Resources Board (CARB) official.
That strategy did not pay off because Schmidt appears to have carried the can for all VW executives. In August, he pleaded guilty to conspiracy and to making a false statement under the Clean Air Act.
Schmidt?s plea deal stated that the former executive could face up to seven years in prison and between $40,000 and $400,000 in fines.
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