Ferdinand Piech to Lose Board Seat at Porsche SE and Remaining Pull at Volkswagen
Former chairman of Volkswagen’s supervisory board Ferdinand Piech may soon be losing his seat on the Porsche SE board as well. While the Porsche and Piech families have combined their VW holdings in Porsche SE, its shareholders are voting on the future makeup of the company’s supervisory board at its annual meeting on May 30. However, a complete list of of candidates has to be decided upon by mid-April and Piech’s name seems to be absent from the early draft.
Wolfgang Porsche and Ferdinand’s brother Hans Michel Piech are both on the list of candidates, but Ferdinand Piech is not, according to the German weekly Bild am Sonntag, citing a person close to the matter. They hypothesized that the decision has more than just a little to do with Piech’s recent behavior regarding the VW emissions probe.
A spokesperson for Porsche SE, which holds 52 percent of Volkswagen’s voting rights, said that the future composition of the board has not yet been decided.
Ferdinand Piech was not immediately available for comment. He resigned as Volkswagen chairman after a confrontation with former Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn in April 2015. Losing his seat at Porsche SE would take him further out of the fold.
Last month, an earlier report from Bild am Sonntag said that Piech had informed management at VW about the possibility of cars cheating diesel emissions tests in the U.S. six months before the scandal went public. Piech has refused to testify on the matter and no insight has been offered to the press on his previous interviews.
All of Piech’s testimonies were given last year to the U.S. law firm Jones Day in April, followed by German prosecutors in December. “These comments were solely directed at the inquirers of Jones Day and the prosecutors respectively. They were not directed at the public media,” Piech’s lawyer, Gerhard Strate, said in a statement.
He also mentioned that Piech has no intention “to comment in public on what is being circulated as the alleged content of the questioning.”
[Image: Volkswagen]
A staunch consumer advocate tracking industry trends and regulation. Before joining TTAC, Matt spent a decade working for marketing and research firms based in NYC. Clients included several of the world’s largest automakers, global tire brands, and aftermarket part suppliers. Dissatisfied with the corporate world and resentful of having to wear suits everyday, he pivoted to writing about cars. Since then, that man has become an ardent supporter of the right-to-repair movement, been interviewed on the auto industry by national radio broadcasts, driven more rental cars than anyone ever should, participated in amateur rallying events, and received the requisite minimum training as sanctioned by the SCCA. Handy with a wrench, Matt grew up surrounded by Detroit auto workers and managed to get a pizza delivery job before he was legally eligible. He later found himself driving box trucks through Manhattan, guaranteeing future sympathy for actual truckers. He continues to conduct research pertaining to the automotive sector as an independent contractor and has since moved back to his native Michigan, closer to where the cars are born. A contrarian, Matt claims to prefer understeer — stating that front and all-wheel drive vehicles cater best to his driving style.
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"German Engineering", even in the board room. Bite it, Volkswagen.
The umlaut is alive and well in Swiss German — indeed in its very name written in this Alemannic German dialect: Schwyzerdütsch. It's a while since I was in Austria, but I'm pretty sure the umlaut continues there also, since it's necessary to indicate correct pronunciation in all German dialects.