Tomte 4 days ago

And one engineer went on vacation to America. Congratulations, you‘ve won seven years in a foreign prison!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Schmidt_(engineer)

3
xrd 4 days ago

Arrested in a men's bathroom, no less!

kotaKat 4 days ago

"Conspiracy to defraud the United States" is a more dignified charge to get in an airport bathroom than what happens when you have a "wide stance" as a Senator.

keeganpoppen 4 days ago

that wikipedia article is atrociously written holy cow. "pawn sacrifice"?!?

fch42 4 days ago

"Bauernopfer" (German for "pawn sacrifice") is a common term in German to mean "sacrificing someone insignificant to get the big guy out of trouble".

So the English translation might be machine-done; in the original German, the word makes a lot of sense and carries a definite meaning.

tanewishly 3 days ago

Not a native speaker, but I've heard the term "sacrificial pawn" being used in such cases in movies and series.

mschuster91 4 days ago

It's the other way around, he was US-based and went for a vacation to Germany.

Tomte 4 days ago

He used to work in the US, but at the time of the US prosecution and his arrest he was back in Wolfsburg, and the vacation was in Florida.

The English Wikipedia article isn‘t terribly clear about that.

bhelkey 4 days ago

Do you have a source for this?

CNN reports that he was on vacation to Florida and was arrested in the airport awaiting a flight home to Germany [1].

[1] https://money.cnn.com/2017/03/17/news/companies/volkswagen-e...

dehugger 4 days ago

He is a German national though. Bit of a confusing situation.