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Convicted VW Diesel Engineer Gets 40 Months in U.S. Prison
A U.S. federal judge in Detroit has sentenced former Volkswagen AG diesel engineer James Liang to 40 months in prison and ordered him to pay a $200,000 fine for his role in Volkswagen AG’s diesel emission cheating scandal.
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A U.S. federal judge in Detroit has sentenced former Volkswagen AG diesel engineer James Liang to 40 months in prison and ordered him to pay a $200,000 fine for his role in Volkswagen AG’s diesel emission cheating scandal.
Liang, 63, is the first person sentenced among eight indicted to date by the U.S. Dept. of Justice in its continuing investigation. A second former executive, Oliver Schmidt, pleaded guilty earlier this month on similar charges and awaits sentencing on Dec. 6. Schmidt faces as much as seven years in prison.
Liang worked in Germany with the team that developed a family of 4-cylinder diesels that VW rigged to evade pollution control rules. He pleaded guilty a year ago to conspiring to defraud regulators and customers about emission levels from the diesels and has been working with prosecutors since then to build cases against higher-level executives.
Prosecutors had requested a 36-month prison term. In imposing tougher penalties, Judge Sean Cox described Liang’s wrongdoing as “a serious crime” involving his knowing participation in “a massive fraud on the American consumer.”
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