http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/24/business/international/directors-say-volkswagen-delayed-informing-them-of-trickery.html?ref=business
Friday, October 23, 2015
Directors Say Volkswagen Delayed Informing Them of Trickery
After the huge scandal that Volkswagen had, there was members on the board claiming that they didn't know anything about the company's emission cheating for two weeks after the top executives admitted the deception to American environmental officials. Since September 18, Volkswagen stock value has dropped by a third. With some of their cars emitted far higher levels of nitrogen oxide they were in trouble with the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Stephan Weil, who is a board member and the prime minister of the German state lower Saxony learned of Volkswagen deception by watching the news. Another board member, learned of this by reading about it online. Around 11 million cars have the illegal software, which were mostly in Europe and the United States. This lead to a huge amount of lawsuits against them. There are shareholder that complained that Volkswagen didn't follow German law requiring it to publicize information that could affect the stock price.
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3 comments:
My biggest question through out this whole ordeal is how could people this high up in the company be oblivious to what was going on lower down? That to me seems pretty sketchy. Also, pulling a trust revoking stunt like this will only cause their stock to decrease because people are going to lose faith in their company. For as long as Volkswagen has been around, this could be very endangering to the future of their company. It will be interesting to see how the company goes about repairing their image to the masses.
One of the reasons we talked about as to why any of the C level executives and board of directors did not know about this is because volkswagen has instilled a culture in their company to not deliver bad news up the ranks. The fact that some of the board of directors had to find out through different forms of new is ridiculous. I agree that if Volkswagen did not follow to law to release all information that could effect stock price, the charges should be filed.
I agree with Rachael, it definitely seems sketchy that top executives were completely unaware of the situation. Even if there is a culture of not delivering bad news up the ranks, I still think that it is unprofessional for them not to accept their responsibility and tell their employees after they had been caught. If some customers were not entirely shaken by the situation in the first place, I would image this adds to the blow.
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