As Volkswagen’s ‘dieselgate’ woes continue, evidence has reportedly emerged of lost or wiped mobile devices – at around the time the scandal broke – held by key VW managers in North America.
Volkswagen Group’s top US lawyer and the leader of its emissions-testing facility in California are among employees whose cell phones were either lost or erased as the company’s diesel emissions scandal emerged, reports say.
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Bloomberg cited court records as source for the information that David Geanacopoulos, VW Group of America’s senior vice president for public affairs and public policy, reported he lost his phone while en route to Los Angeles International Airport on December 1, 2015. He was VW of America’s general counsel at the time, Bloomberg notes.
The report adds that documents also show that the company cell phones of Anna Schneider, VW’s senior vice president of industry and government relations, and Matthias Barke, senior director of VW’s emissions test center in Oxnard, California, were “wiped” or erased of data in the months after the federal EPA announced that VW had rigged emissions tests.
Questions about the lost or erased phones were raised last year by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), according to Bloomberg.
“In the context of the massive scandal at the center of this case, 23 lost or bricked phones is a bright red flag, especially when they include phones that belonged to important individuals,” the FTC said in its filing, according to Bloomberg.
The issue has surfaced publicly following a case filed in Virginia by VW owners and records becoming public after a judge rejected VW request that they be sealed.
Bloomberg said that VW has strongly denied any wrongdoing associated with the lost or erased phones.
Bloomberg reported that the 23 VW mobile devices were either wiped of data or misplaced between September 2015 and February 2016, according to the court records.
See also: VW US ’emissions cheat’ engineer gets jail sentence
