Former Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn may no longer sit at the top of the corporate hierarchy, but that doesn’t mean he’s out of trouble when it comes to Dieselgate. Germany’s financial regulators now want to know if he waited too long to publicize VW’s emissions cheatery.
The Bundesanstalt für Finanzdienstleistungsaufsicht—gesundheit!—or BaFin for short is Germany’s federal financial supervisory authority. Prosecutors are now investigating Winterkorn’s role in keeping Volkswagen’s diesel cheat from the public at BaFin’s request, according to a report from The Verge.
Documents revealed that Winterkorn knew of the software cheat that forced diesel vehicles to behave differently in emissions tests over a year before the United States Environmental Protection Agency made the cheat public. One other ex-Volkswagen executive was also named in the investigation, per The Verge, but that name has not been disclosed.
If it was to keep Volkswagen profitable at the expense of the environment and the car-buying public, it looks like BaFin—along with the rest of the planet—has an issue with that.