“The cartel”

Germany’s most important carmakers have met in “secret workshops” since the 1990s in order to coordinate their exhaust gas treatment systems and collude to fix technology, costs and suppliers, weekly news magazine Der Spiegel and associated website Spiegel Online report. “This could amount to one of the largest cases of cartel agreements in Germany’s economic history,” Frank Dohmen and Dietmar Hawranek write on Spiegel Online. A “sort-of voluntary disclosure” made last year by the country’s biggest carmaker VW revealed that Volkswagen, Audi, Porsche, BMW and Daimler have all been implicated in the secret meetings in which “agreements were made to systematically undermine free competition”, the article says. What might turn out to be especially troublesome for Germany’s most important industry is that the carmakers apparently also agreed on important technical details of their diesel exhaust gas treatment and therefore jointly “laid the basis of the diesel scandal”.

Read the article in German in Der Spiegel here (behind paywall) and on Spiegel online here.