Because with large companies, blame and accountability gets spread thin over a wide area till it evaporates, so everyone gets away with it.
Ultimately the CEO is responsible. To me it doesn't even matter if the CEO knows about it or not, if not the company has poor governance which is the CEOs full responsibility.
Wirecard CEO has been arrested since 2020, will probably sit for another 10 years.
The question is should the CEO have know. A CEO that trys to set a culture of doing the right thing, with training on what the right thing is, and other such things can still be deceived by someone low level who cheats. It is possible for one person to cover their tracks for a long time if they are trying to cheat. It can be years to track down who is doing the immoral thing even after you catch something is wrong.
The question this is this one person (or small group) operating against their instructions, or is it the CEO encouraging people to cheat? That can be a hard question, but we want CEOs to think if I do "enough" (whatever that is) to ensure we obey the law I'm okay and thus I want to ensure enough is done. There are always crooks in the world, we want to ensure they are not encourged. If the CEO is always at fault their thought is likely to go to how can I ensure that tracks are covered so they nobody can be convicted.
Those golden parachutes and lavish lifestyle comes with a cost. That cost is responsibility and risks it brings.
Whether he knew or nit is a matter for courst, but in any case he is responsible too. Punish crooks harsh and visibly, reward honesty and good engineering massively and also visibly and company as a whole will act accordingly. We dont talk about a single guy hacking some firmware build, but a well known company culture.
Which CEO? Of the 4 big German manufacturers, which conspired do implement these special cheats, or Bosch which implemented this cheat, and supported it as such?
Or the politicians who wrote into law to able to use such a cheating device?
That would be 5 CEO's plus at least 2 german politicians, plus 20 more politicians in all other countries which selected this cheating EU standard.
Wanting to use velocity profiles to set exhaust treatment parameters during warm up of the engine is totally reasonable.
Bosh's software is tunable to silly extents to avoid expensive vehicle testing as testing is tied to binaries due to bad processes.
You can more or less make a different program by changing 'parameters'.
I really think it might be unfortunate if this would extend into a crusade versus general computing.
That is extremely wreckless. The board is unquestionably the most responsible party.
Wirecard CEO was proven beyond reasonable doubt that he personally was involved in large-scale fraud.
I believe "knew or should have known" is the legal statement. Ignorance (either deliberate or accidental) doesn't get you off the hook.
Rhodesia solution is magnificient in this case.
Sending A Letter To The PM | Yes Minister | BBC Comedy Greats
But negligence is fundamentally different from mens rea. Fine to punish both but I am not a fan of justice intentionally ignoring context.
> But negligence is fundamentally different from mens rea
It differs in that mens rea is the legal concept of a culpable state of mind, and negligence is one example. More fully, a crime is generally defined by a prohibited act (actua reus) and a wrongful state of mind (mens rea), though there are strict liability crimes with no mens rea required.
For, say, murder (in common law, specific statutory schemes may diverge from this somewhat), the actus reus is homicide, and the mens rea is “malice aforethought”.
While “malice aforethought” is sui generis and seen only in murder, the common kinds of mens rea used in defining crimes, in descending order of the severity with which they are usually treated, are intent, recklessness, and negligence. (The same mental states are relevant in tort liability, though strict liability in tort is more common, and the civil and criminal definitions of negligence, particularly, are somewhat different.)
In this case both the company and the responsible managers were held liable. Of course a lot of blame shifting was attempted, but clearly it did not result in no one being held responsible.
Not really, it's just that rich people are mostly above the law most of the time
When it comes to criminal offences, they are pretty much within the law, well except they can afford better lawyers so usually get away with minimum legally possible punishment.
Companies and the concept of limited liability exists to make innovation possible. No one will start a startup knowing they will have their house confiscated and go to prison if it fails. And, because majority of money businessmen make is the stock worth, company being insolvent and thus it's stock losing all value is in itself a punishment heavy enough for the founders.
> No one will start a startup knowing they will have their house confiscated and go to prison if it fails.
What does that have to do with anything? We're not discussing a case of VW making bad business decisions and losing money.
If you start a company and break the law and harm people, you should have your house confiscated and/or go to prison. If you can't take this responsibility, just don't start the startup, that's perfect.
You are creating confusion about the subject being discussed in order to defend criminals.
Yes that was a bad example. The "limited liability" concept applies to financial losses, not crimes.
We need to balance the benefit and the downside of the limited liability in corporations. If innovation no longer becomes beneficial for the society and only beneficial for a small number of people, perhaps the society may need to reconsider the concept.
Why would you go to jail unless you're doing something illegal? Are you honestly saying startups should be legally exempt from pollution laws and allowed to cheat brazenly on commissions tests by public agencies? It's fair for rich people to just lose some income(and still be rich) for crimes while poor people have to go to jail is honestly a unhinged take
Rich people are above the law precisely because they use corporations and corporate laws as shields to deflect personal liability of their actions as a actions of "the company" which is a faceless entity.
"You see, I didn't steal your money, the company I ran stole your money, but that's actually on you because you didn't read the fine print I put in the contract you signed. And don't worry, justice was served, the company got punished and is now insolvent. Now watch this drive *swings golf club*"
It’s worse than that. Rich-people crimes are often codified as much less severe than regular-people crimes, or are just outright legal.
This is a great example. Why is this emissions fakery illegal? Ultimately it’s because pollution kills people. Are these people going to prison for killing people? Not exactly. They’re going to prison for killing too many people. If they had stayed within the limits, they’d still be killing people, just not as many, and it would be 100% legal.
Stab a person in the lungs, go to jail. Kill people by putting toxins into their lungs, well, just stay under this limit.
Walk out the door with a $10 item you didn’t pay for, crime. Fail to pay your worker $1,000 that they earned, that’s a civil matter. Worst case you’ll have to pay a penalty.
> Why is this emissions fakery illegal? Ultimately it’s because pollution kills people. Are these people going to prison for killing people? Not exactly. They’re going to prison for killing too many people. If they had stayed within the limits, they’d still be killing people, just not as many, and it would be 100% legal.
Polluting is not a "rich person" crime. It's very much something normal/poor people do a lot, too. It's common for individuals to burn leaves. It's less common, but also an active problem, for them to burn piles of trash (including plastic, tires, etc.)
As an individual, I'm allowed to do a certain amount of pollution (some because it's legal, some because it's unenforced), and will get fined if I do too much, same as the corporation.
As an individual, at least you can make the argument that your activities result in far less than one death. What’s the appropriate punishment for one micromort? I don’t know the answer to that but it’s probably not too much.
Large polluters don’t have that excuse. I recall that diesel hate alone resulted in dozens or hundreds of excess deaths. How many people do compliant cars kill? How many does a coal power plant kill? And all 100% legal.
“Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned, they therefore do as they like.”
Edward, Lord Thurlow c.1850
> I didn't steal your money, the company I ran stole your money
This isn’t how it works.
This is exactly how it works. Liability spread out over even just 10 people is so much less risky than one person.
A corporation can do pretty much anything. Steal, lie, poison communities, give people HIV. Anything.
> This is exactly how it works.
No, it isn’t. Limited liability does not shield executives from criminal prosecution. If an LLC defrauds another party, the perpetrators are both criminally and civilly liable; this is true in every common law country you can think of. Limited liability corporations enjoy a limitation of civil liability (i.e. the shareholders cannot be held liable for more than the company is worth). This limitation is not exhaustive in the case of fraud or criminal negligence. In practice it is of course possible that people “get away with” both, but that is a failing of law enforcement, not limited liability itself.
Someone floated on here that the punishment should be partial government ownership stakes instead of weak fines. It doesn't syphon off funds and risk damaging important national companies that are 'too big to punish'. Instead it dilutes shareholder value and DIRECTLY impacts the company owners. It also gives the government an inside place in the company which no company wants to deal with. If a company doesn't change ultimately the owners lose ownership.
That sounds like a terrible idea because it would progressively "bribe" the government to be in their interest to take the company's side as they gain more and more of it. Combine it that conflicts of interest with the appearance of improprirety and another conflict of interest of making expropriation of the successful a temptation.
The latter could be even more disasterous long term. Nobody wants to go out to dinner with cannibals or show up at the stores for fear of being eaten. Likewise being known as an expropriating country, you may as well go ahead and embargo yourself.
Proof that solutions exist, if we want them. Whatever the cause of the apparent impunity of large corporations and rich people, it is not a lack of workable solutions. See also fines proportional to income, which now exist in multiple countries.
I wonder if you could require the company to licence all its IP for free within the country. So that the brand and designs could still exist.
VW already is owned by the German state of NRW (20% of the voting rights, 11.8% of the equity)
Not exactly. Volkswagen headquarters are located in Wolfsburg which belongs to the German state of Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen). NRW, or officially abbreviated NW, is the state of North Rhine-Westphalia (Nordrhein-Westfalen).
Therefore it's Lower Saxony that owns some parts of Volkswagen.
VW is owned by the Porsche family. Audi also shortly owned it. Audi creates the engines for VW, because VW by itself can create nothing much by itself.
Porsche Automobil Holding SE owns about 53% of the voting rights, but only about 35% of the assets, so technically they do not own VW, they just control it.
Audi never owned Volkswagen. Volkswagen has owned Audi since 1964. What is true is that there has been an attempt of Porsche AG (the sports car company, not the capital holding) to take over VW in the late 2000s, but got switcheroo'd and instead taken over by VW.
While Audi does build some engines for VW (especially in the higher-tier sector, which arguably is more of an Audi thing to begin with), VW itself produces engines itself (to name a few, the TSI-, TDI- and TGI-series of engines).
Now, does VW build good cars? It's a hit and miss. I personally drive a New Beetle, and will probably continue to drive it for years, the thing is build like a tank and reliable to a fault. Then you have models that are ... not something I would like to drive.