Let's turn now to our daily Bloomberg Law Brief, exploring legal issues in the news. Today, Bloomberg Law host Tune Grosso and Greg Store discussed Volkswagen's admission of guilt in the diesel cheating scandal. After U S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced charges against five Volkswagen executives. They speak to Eric Gordon, a professor at Michigan Law School, and Anthony Sabino,
founding partner of Sabino and Sabino. Anthony in this plea agreement, Volkswagen, Uh, as I understand it, admitted that its employees agreed to deceive both regulators and customers. Can we look at this as Volkswagen has sort of, uh, you know, given up its employees in this case in order to to kind of deal to some extent. Yes, Again, I think Volkswagen realizes that this was the course of achieving a settlement
with the United States governments. I have no doubt that Attorney General Lynch, and she's always been known as a hard charging, very thorough litigator, both in private practice as well as in her various roles at the Justice Department as U S Attorney por prior to being the g that they demanded this as part of the bargain, and UH again allegations which now would appair to be admitted
to UH, thereby becoming facts of a sort. UH. Seems to be very little doubt that these folks did what they were accused of, and Volkswagen viewed it as a necessity put upon them. So from that point, Eric, this settlement is the largest criminal fine imposed on an automaker. It's almost five times what GM paid and four times what Toyota paid to settle their cases. Why so large? Yeah, because this is really severe. Um you had you know, in GM, Um you probably had some stupidity and some
cover up. UM in v W what you had as a company that made a conscious decision, we will violate the law. We will pollute the air in order to sell cars. Uh. Nobody at GM said, well, in order to sell cars, we're gonna put in this Crumby ignition switch. They put in an ignition switch that turned out to be Crumby, and they knew about it and didn't change it. But they didn't upfront say wow, we're gonna make some money.
We gotta make money. We gotta sell cars. UM. And the only way we can do it is by putting in a crumby ignition switch. So the wrongdoing here is to use the technical legal term just so yucky. It's just so despicable that, uh, you know, I'm surprised that the multiple wasn't even higher. That's Eric Gordon, the professor at Michigan Law School, and Anthony Sabino, founding partner of Sabino and Sabino, speaking to Bloomberg Law host June Grosso
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