Volkswagen faces first mammoth diesel lawsuit on home turf

BRAUNSCHEIG, Germany - Car behemoth Volkswagen will face a German court Monday, as hundreds of thousands of owners of manipulated diesel cars demand compensation 4 years after the country's largest post-war industrial scandal erupted.

The first hearing in what is likely to be a grinding, years-long trial opens at 0800 GMT in Brunswick (4 p.m. in Manila), around 30 kilometers (19 miles) from VW headquarters in the northern city of Wolfsburg.

Around 450,000 people have joined a first-of-its-kind grouped proceeding, introduced by lawmakers after the "dieselgate" emissions cheating scandal broke in 2015.

Consumer rights group VZBV, representing the plaintiffs, says the German carmaker deliberately harmed buyers by installing motor control software that allowed vehicles to pollute far more on the road than under lab conditions.

The trial is Germany's largest so far in the tentacular diesel scandal, which last week saw VW chief executive Herbert Diess charged with market manipulation over his role.

50 QUESTIONS FOR JUDGES

In the mass lawsuit, the most important of around 50 questions for judges is whether Volkswagen "caused harm" by acting "dishonestly".

Klaus Mueller of VZBV said he is "convinced" the car firm did, while VW says "clients did not suffer harm."

"Hundreds of thousands of cars are used" on the roads without problem, VW lawyer Martine de Lind van Wijngaarden said.

Even if judges find in favor of plaintiffs, there will not be an immediate compensation payment.

Rather, every owner registered in the trial will have to claim individually.

VW thinks a final judgement could arrive in 2023 at the earliest, if the case is appealed all the way to the Federal Court of Justice.

Individual proceedings could then take at least another year -- in the court of first instance.

By then, the cars' market value could have eroded to a negligible amount, making a buyback cheaper for the firm.

To avoid such delays, the VZBV says it is "open" to an out-of-court settlement but "in that case, VW would have to pay a significant sum after all," Mueller told AFP.

Given the wide variety of cases under the group action umbrella, VW finds a mass settlement "hard to imagine."

In early July, judges noted in a preliminary opinion that some owners listed among the plaintiffs were living abroad.

That could mean German law does not apply to them.

Volkswagen said 2 percent of those listed live abroad and 10 percent are duplicate entries.

Alongside the grouped proceeding, 61,000 individual lawsuits have been filed in Germany, and some have already led to out-of-court settlements.

30 BILLION EUROS

Since 2015, when Volkswagen admitted to manipulating 11 million vehicles worldwide to fool emissions tests, the scandal has cost the group over 30 billion euros ($33 billion) in fines, compensation and legal costs.

Most of that sum -- $22 billion -- has gone to the US, while in Germany VW has so far paid just 2.3 billion dollars spread across three fines.

Alongside car owners, investors are claiming damages for losses they suffered when the group's share price plummeted after it came clean.

And earlier this week, chief executive Herbert Diess and supervisory board chief Hans Dieter Poetsch were charged with market manipulation.

Former chief executive Martin Winterkorn, who stepped down over the scandal, has been also charged with fraud.

Away from the legal battlegrounds, "dieselgate" has sped up the fuel's decline from its status as lower-carbon alternative to petrol, favored with government subsidies.

In Germany, its market share among new registrations has fallen from 46 to 33 percent, and the level of nitrogen oxides (NOx) emitted by the cars risks earning them bans from some city centers.

The diesel scandal is "part of the group's history" just like the famous Beetle and Golf models, says VW brand chief Ralf Brandstaetter.

But he adds the company has "profoundly changed," investing 30 billion euros in a new electric range to "regain society's respect."

"The diesel crisis was a catalyst for our transformation," Brandstaetter told AFP in a recent interview.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

US minorities consume less but suffer more from pollution - study

WASHINGTON - US air pollution is disproportionately caused by white consumers, while African-Americans and Hispanics are burdened most by the emissions, a peer-reviewed study showed on Monday.

On average, African-Americans are exposed to about 56 percent more fine particulate matter pollution than is caused by their consumption of goods and services, said the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Hispanics, on average, bear a burden of 63 percent excess exposure, it said.

Whites, on the other hand, experience a "pollution advantage," meaning they are exposed to 17 percent less pollution than is caused by their consumption.

"What surprised me the most was the magnitude of the discrepancy," said Jason Hill, a biosytems engineering professor at the University of Minnesota and co-author of the study. "It's surprisingly large."

The study was the first to quantify what it called "pollution inequity" and to track it over time.

Particulate matter pollution has a wide variety of sources including coal-fired power plants, agriculture, road dust, and industry. Blacks and Hispanics bear a higher proportion of the pollution because of where most of them live, compared with where most white people live, said the study, which tapped census data.

The problem occurs across the country, not just in industrial areas alongside major cities like Houston and New York, it said.

The study was paid for in part by a 5-year grant that included money from federal agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency and was launched when Barack Obama was president. The grant has continued to be funded by the administration of President Donald Trump.

Both racial minorities and whites have benefited from clean air regulations, the study found, with fine particulate pollution falling about 50 percent on average between 2003 and 2015.

But the pollution inequity remains stubborn, it said. Public-health advocates and environmentalists say the Trump administration's push to unravel regulations on power plants, industry, and vehicles while pursuing increased drilling and mining will make air pollution worse.

The study found that fine particulate pollution from domestic sources caused about 102,000 premature US deaths a year from heart attacks, strokes, lung cancer, and other diseases.

Julian Marshall, an engineering professor at the University of Washington and co-author of the study, said its approach could be extended to other pollutants.

"When it comes to determining who causes air pollution, and who breathes that pollution, this research is just the beginning."

source: news.abs-cbn.com