Matthias Muller

ONE of the more astonishing courts papers to be filed in the US District Court in Michigan reveals that orders by VW’s lawyers to preserve documents relating the the infamous defeat device in VW diesel engines were taken by VW employees as a hint to commence a massive shredding operation before the document preservation deadlines kicked in.

According to the court papers, as VW employees prepared to admit to US regulators that VW used a defeat device in its 2.0-litre diesel engines, legal counsel for VW Group of America prepared litigation hold notices which were designed to ensure that VW GOA preserve documents relevant to the diesel emissions issues for the benefit of the investigation.

Litigation hold notices were also prepared for VW AG head office in Wolfsburg.

Under US law, deleting documents relevant to a US government investigation is obstruction of justice and a criminal offence.

But, according to the court papers, the statements by the attorney were taken by VW employees to be a hint that rather than assemble the documents for use in an investigation, they should gather and shred the incriminating documents before the hold notices came into effect.

Under the heading of “Obstruction of Justice”, the settlement document shows that VW acknowledges that employees in both VW AG and Audi AG in Germany and the US set about destroying “thousands of documents” relating to US emissions issues.

2008 Volkswagen Caddy

They also show that VW employees, when they realised similar documents existed in other related companies entreated employees in those companies to destroy the documents as well.

The court papers show that VW AG accepts that “the VW AG and Audi AG employees who participated in this deletion activity did so to protect VW and themselves from the legal consequences of their actions” (in the use of the defeat device).

The settlement papers said that when VW engineers were told a “hold” on relevant documents was imminent and that “these engineers should check their documents” to identify them, “multiple participants understood this to mean that they should delete documents prior to the hold being issued”.

The settlement papers said those destroying documents relating to the US emissions issue included supervisors in the VW brand engine development department at VW AG.

The papers tell of a supervisor who instructed an assistance to locate a disk drive containing information implicating him in knowledge of the defeat device and when the drive was located the assistant was told to throw away the hard drive.

At one stage in September 2015, when the balloon was going up, a supervisor in the VW brand engine development department addressed a meeting “of between 30 and 40 employees” who were told that any new documents created regarding the issue, “because they could be harmfull to VW AG” should be saved to USB drives and only saved to the VW AG system “if necessary”.

The settlement said that thousands of documents were destroyed by as many as 40 employees of VW AG and Audi AG although once the investigation started VW AG was able to recover “many of the deleted documents”.

By John Mellor