Almost 300 institutional investors in Volkswagen have filed a multi-billion dollar suit against the carmaker for what they claim were breaches of its stock market duty in the emissions cheating scandal.
The lawsuit, for damages of €3.3bn ($3.6bn), was filed at a regional court in Braunschweig in VW’s home state of Lower Saxony on Monday and is being brought by 278 investors from all over the world, including German insurers and US pension fund Calpers.
In 2015 VW was caught using “default device” software to systematically cheat on US regulators’ emissions tests.
Martin Winterkorn, the global chief executive of VW, resigned in September 2015 in the near-immediate aftermath of the scandal, which wiped billions of euros off VW’s market value and left the company facing fines of as much as $20bn and a criminal investigation by the US Department of Justice.
Law firm TISAB said the German lawsuit claims VW neglected to keep the markets properly informed between June 2008 and 18 September, 2015.
A spokesman for VW said the carmaker could not comment because it had not been sent the suit.
Volkswagen earlier this month published an account of the events leading to the violation of US emissions law being publicly announced by the US Environmental Protection Agency.
The law firm has also filed a motion for a so-called model claims, a German legal procedure which – for lack of US style class-action lawsuits – uses court rulings won by individual investors as templates to set damages for others that are equally affected.
Andreas Tilp, on eof the lead lawyers, said in a statement: “Due to the fact that – according to our information and experience – Volkswagen AG persistently denies any settlement negotiations and also refuses to waive the statute of limitation defence until now, it was necessary to file this first multi-billion euro lawsuit.”
In October Tilp filed a lawsuit on behalf of retail investors.
(Published by The Guardian - March 15, 2016)