Accused VW Executive Claims to Have Been 'Misused' by Company

One of the handful of Volkswagen Group executives that have been forced to appear in front of a judge over the company’s widespread emission scandal, Oliver Schmidt, has exclaimed he was misused by his employer after issuing a guilty plea. Unless the charges are revised prior to sentencing, the former VW employee has copped to conspiracy to defraud the federal government and violating the Clean Air Act. A third charge of aiding and abetting wire fraud was rolled into the conspiracy charge.

The admission to corporate wrongdoing was made in August. However the claim that the company had taken advantage of him came later via a letter to U.S. judge Sean Cox.

“I must say that I feel misused by my own company in the diesel scandal or ‘Dieselgate’,” Schmidt wrote. The letter was filed in the court documents and later published in Germany’s Bild am Sonntag before being shared by Reuters.

Schmidt headed the Volkswagen’s environmental and engineering office in Auburn Hills, Michigan, until February of 2015. In his letter to the judge, he claimed he had agreed to follow a script issued by Volkswagen management and a high-ranking lawyer, during a meeting with Alberto Ayala, a California Air Resources Board official.

“In hindsight, I should never have agreed to meet with Dr Ayala on that day,” he wrote. “Or better yet, I should have gone to that meeting and ignored the instructions given to me and told Dr Ayala that there is a defeat device in the VW diesel engine vehicles and that VW had been cheating for almost a decade. I did not do that and that is why I find myself here today.”

U.S. prosecutors have charged eight current and former Volkswagen executives at this time. Schmidt’s legal team is pressing for a reduced sentence but he’s facing up to seven years in prison and a fine between $40,000 and $400,000 due to the nature of the crimes.