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BGH clarifies admissibility: Did thousands of VW drivers take too long with their complaints?

2021-07-13T16:29:59.961Z


It has long been established by the highest court that Volkswagen has duped millions of diesel buyers. Thousands of car owners took a long time to file their claims for damages. Too long?


It has long been established by the highest court that Volkswagen has duped millions of diesel buyers.

Thousands of car owners took a long time to file their claims for damages.

Too long?

Karlsruhe - Thousands of diesel plaintiffs only asked for damages from VW * years after the exhaust gas scandal * broke up - since Tuesday the Federal Court of Justice (BGH) has been clarifying whether they may have waited too long.

The Karlsruhe judgment, which will be announced in the next few weeks, is groundbreaking for the vast majority of lawsuits that were not brought until 2019 or even later.

According to Volkswagen, this affects around 20,000 proceedings.

(Az. VI ZR 1118/20)

VW had secretly used fraudulent software in millions of diesel vehicles with the EA189 engine, which in government tests disguised the fact that too many pollutants were actually emitted.

The manipulations came to light in September 2015.

Claims for damages usually expire after three years.

Plaintiffs should therefore actually have been active by the end of 2018 at the latest.

However, the deadline only runs from the year in which someone found out about their car being affected or should have found out about it "without gross negligence" - and in many cases in court it is disputed whether that was still 2015.

In the negotiated case from Saxony-Anhalt, the Naumburg Higher Regional Court had last ruled that the claims were statute-barred.

Due to the broad media coverage, everything became public in 2015 that the plaintiff should have known.

The presiding BGH judge Stephan Seiters indicated that this did not prove that the plaintiff had also noticed this.

Nobody is obliged to follow the reports.

The judges had not yet formed a final opinion on a second point in their preliminary deliberations. The plaintiff had temporarily registered for the model declaratory action brought by the consumer advice centers against VW in order to prevent the statute of limitations on his claims. He later withdrew and filed a lawsuit himself. VW lawyer Reiner Hall spoke of a “mass phenomenon”: the law firms specializing in diesel cases had wasted time to get the flood of lawsuits under control. The question is whether that was a valid gimmick or an abuse of the law.

(dpa) Merkur.de is part of IPPEN.DIGITAL.

Source: merkur

All news articles on 2021-07-13

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