BERLIN – Former Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn is to go on trial in September on charges of fraud and market manipulation linked to the automaker's diesel emissions scandal, a German court said Friday.
The state court in Braunschweig said the trial in what were originally two separate cases will start on Sept. 3. It added in a statement that it has scheduled 89 court sessions through September 2025.
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Winterkorn, now 76, has denied wrongdoing. Proceedings against him have been delayed because of health problems.
Winterkorn resigned from Volkswagen days after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced a notice of violation on Sept. 18, 2015.
The company had for years been using software that recognized when vehicles were on test stands and turned emission controls on, then turned the emission controls off during normal driving. As a result, the cars emitted far more than the legal U.S. limit of nitrogen oxide, a pollutant that harms people’s health.
In the market manipulation case, Winterkorn is accused of knowing about the installation of an illegal “defeat device” in about 500,000 cars on the U.S. market and deliberately failing to inform stock markets in good time of a “significant financial risk” that had started to materialize in early 2015.
Volkswagen paid more than 30 billion euros ($32.8 billion) in fines and settlements over the scandal.