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Confident and eloquent: Stadler in court
Photo: CHRISTOF STACHE / AFP
Rupert Stadler is early on this special day.
As early as 7.45 a.m., the former Audi boss made his way through the journalists waiting in sub-zero temperatures to the courthouse at the high-security prison in Munich Stadelheim.
The first criminal proceedings for the diesel scandal have been running here since September, and Stadler is the first top manager in the dock.
He wears a black turtleneck under his blue suit - and chats tidily with his defense lawyers before the trial opens.
Apparently he is shivering a bit in the Corona-related well-ventilated courtroom.
The digital cameras click.
Then the once powerful and still eloquent manager took the floor for the first time since his arrest on June 18, 2018.
“My name is Rupert Stadler.
I was born on March 17th, 1063 in Titting in Bavaria.
I've been married for over 30 years and have three children. «Slowly, very clearly and with a rolling» R «, Stadler guides us through his career at Audi, where since 1990 he has been from sales employee to executive assistant to VW patriarch Ferdinand Piëch and finally rose to head Audi in 2007.
But that's just the prelude.
Stadler's topic today is the enormously complex inner workings of a car company like VW and the working world of a CEO, which is clocked up to the minute.
All of this should probably serve to explain why Stadler allegedly did not know about the diesel manipulation until autumn 2015, and why he later did not clarify differently or better after the scandal was exposed under pressure from the US authorities at VW than he did.
The processing of the scandal was largely controlled by the parent company and the US law firm Jones Day commissioned by it.
Audi itself received only unsatisfactory information from Jones Day.
Nonetheless, in setting up the Diesel Commission at Audi, he, Stadler, had done everything to work up the technical background of the manipulation of the emissions levels alleged by the US authorities and to cooperate with the German Federal Motor Transport Authority.
"I'm always ready to take on responsibility as the head of the company," says Stadler.
But only where it can be assigned to him personally.
Half a glass of red wine on my pants
The ex-boss sees himself only as a kind of political responsibility, he looks for real guilt with his former employees.
In the meantime, he had to take note of the fact that, under his responsibility as CEO, employees not only made mistakes, but also behaved in accordance with criminal law.
There is a lack of awareness of injustice, especially in engine development.
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With this, Stadler attacks the co-defendant engine developer Giovanni P. head-on.
He accuses him of lying about a trip to the USA, during which Audi managers and developers were supposed to comment on the allegations of the American authorities Carb and EPA.
The public prosecutor accuses Stadler of arranging for parts of a presentation to be deleted or not shown to the US authorities before a meeting with the US authorities on November 19, 2015 in Ann Arbor.
He also made sure that Giovanni P. does not take part in the official meeting so that he cannot say anything incriminating.
Stadler rejects all of this.
"I did not give a presentation in Ann Harbor, I did not have any direct or indirect influence on the content of the presentation, nor on the composition of the participants in the presentation." The prosecution's allegations are false.
He can also remember it so well because Giovanni P. sat next to him at a meal on the evening before the carb talk and spilled half a glass of red wine on his trousers, says Stadler.
The engine developer, whom he had not known before, did not take the opportunity to talk to him during this meal.
Stadler's head glows red at the end
Stadler also believes that his subordinates at the time are to blame for the years of delayed clarification of the fraud at Audi.
"If the developers responsible - as was the case with VW Pkw - had dropped their pants for the USA and Europe in autumn 2015, many of the problems with the salami tactics they caused would have been manageable," says Stadler.
In the end, Stadler also distributes against the public prosecutor, as his defense lawyers had already done at the beginning of the trial.
He was dismayed at how the Munich II public prosecutor's office and the public prosecutor's office "dealt with him in these proceedings and are still dealing with them."
The investigators had relied on the apparently untrue statements of Giovanni P.
During an interrogation, the public prosecutor once stated that a CEO had no right to special treatment.
"That's right.
But the public prosecutor's office does not have the right to deliberately treat me worse than other parties involved in the proceedings. "He does not expect any political treatment that would" abuse him as a figurehead ".
In the end, Stadler's head glows red, but he looks satisfied.
He does not want to answer questions from the public prosecutor's office and defense lawyers until later in the trial.
So his claims stay that way on this day.
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