With General Motors facing continuing investigations into its handling of a vehicle safety defect linked to 13 deaths, its legal department has become a focus of a broad internal inquiry into how the company handled the issue, according to The New York Times.
GM has acknowledged that it knew about the defect for more than a decade and insisted that work on defective ignition switches was limited to a handful of mid level employees.
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But the NYT, quoting two sources with knowledge of the issue, said a review of internal documents, emails and interviews show that high level executives, particularly in GM’s legal department, led by general counsel Michael Millikin, acted with increasing urgency in the last 12 months to grapple with the spreading impact of the ignition problem.
Transportation secretary Anthony Foxx said GM would be fined US$35m for its failure to promptly report the defect. The carmaker declined to make Millikin or any other executives available for interviews.
The NYT noted that, since the recall began, four senior executives have resigned or left the company, including a top engineer, Jim Federico, who avoided being deposed in a lawsuit last summer when GM lawyers suddenly settled a case tied to a defective ignition switch.
Despite its agreement to pay the US$35m penalty, GM faces several investigations focusing on whether the company’s top officers ignored the need to fix faulty ignition switches in some of its vehicles.
GM has said that it knows of 13 deaths tied to the failure of ignition switcheswhich caused Chevrolet Cobalts and other cars to lose engine power and deactivate air bags. But the company has conceded that more fatalities could be linked to the problem.
Last September GM lawyers unexpectedly approved a settlement of a lawsuit filed by the family of a Georgia woman who died in a Cobalt crash in 2010. The NYT said that documents show that GM restarted its nearly dormant internal investigation because of information brought to its attention in the Georgia case.
From the time that GM employees began giving depositions in the case in April 2013 until the end of the year, there have been at least 112 crashes involving the now-recalled vehicles, resulting in 122 injuries and three deaths, according to federal records reviewed by the NYT.
