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Rupert Stadler at the beginning of the trial in Stadelheim
Photo: LUKAS BARTH-TUTTAS / POOL / EPA-EFE / Shutterstock
It's an agonizing 20 minutes in the high-security courtroom in the Munich-Stadelheim correctional facility.
A dozen photographers and cameramen keep their devices aimed at the accused, click-click-click-click.
The former head of Audi engine development
Wolfgang Hatz
(61) stands tall between his two defenders in the front row.
Standing for the photographers at the beginning has been the norm in prominent white collar criminal proceedings for years.
A sinner sitting in the dock, nobody wants to see pictures like this spread around.
Except
Rupert Stadler
(57).
In the first criminal trial five years after the diesel scandal at Audi and the parent company Volkswagen was discovered by the US environmental agency, the world is watching.
But the former Audi boss just stays seated.
First he chats relaxed with his lawyer.
Then he puts on his typical neutral photo face and looks into the cameras.
For minutes.
Stadler has always protested his innocence.
Why should he follow recommendations as to whether he should sit or stand at the start of the process?
For months he has tried as far as possible to radiate normality.
Stadler now acts as a "consultant"
He looks slim in his blue suit and well trained.
In Ingolstadt, where he lives in the very center of town, he was seen a lot running, cycling and playing golf this summer.
He wears his gray hair longer than before, and a curl falls on his forehead.
He's registered with the professional network LinkedIn as a "consultant (freelance)" and likes to comment on personnel from the VW Group.
With his former engine boss Hatz, however, Stadler, who sits diagonally behind Hatz in the second row, has nothing to say this morning.
A Corona-compatible "Faust-Check" as a welcome, that's it.
When Hatz looks back and greets a friend with a wink, he looks over Stadler.
At 9.45 a.m. the appearance of the judges around the chairman
Stefan Weickert
ends
the photography aria with a delay of 15 minutes.
It took more than three quarters of an hour for the last of the only 20 journalists and spectators allowed in the hall to pass the security gate.
The interest in the mammoth trial with four defendants and a total of 181 days of trial is huge.
Already on Tuesday morning, almost 24 hours before the opening of the main hearing, the first representative of a media company was standing in line, eight even spent the night on the sidewalk at the entrance to the court, a concrete bunker next to the spacious prison grounds.
A staircase leads down from the bunker into the spacious, six-meter-high hall in the prison.
Engineers sometimes confess
After Weickert has established the personalities and read out the data of the pre-trial detention served by Stadler, Hatz and another defendant, Stadler's defense attorney
Thilo Pfordte
intervenes with an application: He demands information from the judges and
lay
judges of the 5th criminal division whether they or family members are in At the time of the manipulations from 2009 to 2018, they would have driven cars with a diesel engine developed by the VW Group.
If so, they might be biased.
Weickert replies, "We will answer that in due course".
Prosecutors
Dominik Kieninger
and
Christian Schuster
read
over 90 pages of the indictment for
hours
.
They accuse Stadler, Hatz and two former Audi engineers of fraud, indirect false certification and criminal advertising.
Because Audi plays a central role in the engine development of Volkswagen, the four defendants are said to be responsible for hundreds of thousands of fraud not only at the Ingolstadt subsidiary, but also at the sister brands Porsche and VW.
Stadler and Hatz reject the allegations;
According to the prosecutor, the two engineers are partly confessing.
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Hatz and the engineers accuse the criminal investigators of having developed the illegal defeat device with which Volkswagen manipulated the emission values.
The engine control software ensured that the cars recognized whether they were on the test bench.
Only then did they comply with the required emission limits.
On the other hand, the nitrogen oxide levels on the road were many times higher.
The engines with the illegal function were installed in 434,000 vehicles from Audi, Porsche and VW and sold in Europe and the USA.
Because the 78,000 vehicles affected could no longer be sold in the USA and were only worth scrap, the public prosecutor's office estimates the damage in this market alone at more than 3.1 billion euros.
Reprogramming the software cost at least 170 million euros in Europe and the USA.
The allegation of "indirect false certification" relates to the registration certificates for vehicles in the EU in which the fraudulent software was not mentioned.
Damage through impairment is 27 million euros
According to the public prosecutor, Stadler should have intervened in September 2015 at the latest after the scandal surrounding manipulated exhaust gases was exposed.
This is "commercial fraud through failure," said court
spokesman Florian Gliwitzky
.
The investigators put the damage caused by the depreciation of the cars at 27 million euros.
The amount of damage can be important for the sentence.
According to Gliwitzky, the penalty range is between six months and ten years.
Stadler had already been in custody for four and a half months in the Augsburg-Gablingen JVA.
Statements from defense lawyers and defendants are not expected in Stadelheim until next week.
According to their lawyers, Stadler and Hatz want to express themselves personally.