Luxury car marker Porsche has been fined €535 million by a German court for its involvement in an ongoing diesel scandal. Public prosecutors in Stuttgart charged the company with “negligent violations of supervisory duties” after it was found to have cheated on its emissions tests.
Porsche – which is a unit of the Volkswagen Group – has been embroiled in this case for almost a decade after it was exposed by US regulators, because some of its cars used engines made by sister brands Audi and VW.
Reacting to the fine Porsche said: “it never developed and produced diesel engines”. It also added: “According to the investigation results of the public prosecutor’s office in Stuttgart, there have been negligent violations of supervisory duties in a department of the development department several levels below the board in the exhaust gas-related testing of vehicles on their regulatory compliance.”
The car manufacturer also said it will not be filing an appeal against the penalty notice for negligent breach of duty, which brings an end to the prosecutors’ lawsuit against Porsche.
Last year VW Group was fined €1 billion by public prosecutors in Braunschweig, near its Wolfsburg headquarters, for its criminal role in the scandal, in which 10.7 million cars were equipped with software that cheated tests and emitted up to 40 times the permitted level of nitrogen oxide in the real world.
