Your editorial ("VW is not alone in veering off the straight and narrow", The Herald, September 26) equating, as it does, the current scandal at Volkswagon with recent banking scandals, is erroneous in one fundamental point.
The recent financial sector scandals, for the most part, involved rogue individuals, lack of accountability and proper corporate governance, coupled with, either complacency, or incompetence at the highest levels of the institutions involved.
The VW troubles however, appear to reveal deliberate and systematic fraud, on an enormous scale.
The "cheating" software, required to be conceived, developed, tested, produced and installed, Quite apart from the necessary approvals which would have been required at various levels of the organisation, at each stage, to proceed to the next, budgets would have required to have be prepared, revised, approved, spent, and subsequently accounted for.
Given the scale of the problem that is emerging, these budgets would have been significant, even for an organisation the size of VW. Was the financial director unaware of this spending ? Were the auditors ?
Was the operations director unaware of what was being installed in the cars ? Was the head of environmental compliance ? Were the procurement managers who issued specifications for the purchase or manufacture of the "cheating" software also in blissful ignorance ?
The idea that the board were all unaware of this beggars belief.
The CEO has resigned with a £23 million package. He was either criminally complicit or criminally incompetent. The remainder of the Board, almost certainly, fall within in the same category.
Indeed, given the speed at which the PR professions acted, and provided the textbook response to such a crisis ("apologise apologise, apologise, but don't admit personal involvement") and the accountants, so speedily estimated what funds were required to be set aside to deal with the problem, one wonders if VW already had a contingency plan in place for when they were eventually caught out.
William Keil,
Warriston Avenue,
Edinburgh.
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