It is still quite likely he won't be repeating the mistake though. Prison is something else than just money.
He also likely knows a lot about how many of his superiors were in the loop on this, so I assume he was well compensated for his inconvenience.
It's not that unusual in Germany, at any time about 16% of prisoners are in "offener Vollzug", and it is a great tool to reintegrate prisoners into society. It is limited to first offenders with no flight risk and no risk that they use their time out of prison to do crime.
Of course no matter how useful of a tool it is generally, it does make the prison sentences of some well known people look like a bit of a joke.
1: https://www.zdf.de/dokumentation/zdfinfo-doku/knast-in-deuts...
Volkswagen emissions killed people with smog. VW are homicidal.
Turns out that it's almost universally true everywhere that enough wealth and power puts you above the law.
or is there no responsibility held by whoever we place in office responsible for seeing our futures aren't squandered?
how is it possible to ignore that obligation and duty when we've only just started to admit that we have to act against such universal polluting?
or has the last encumbant of 2000 Pensylvania Av. just pulled off the brilliant trick of assuming all the blame for the failure of government future and past as well?
(brit with American family and too embarrassed to speak of our politicians presently)
Where was the oversight? How was it that an open secret of this magnitude didn’t incur the wrath of environmental agencies in the countries affected? Is it possible that no-one outside of the industry knew about this and that everyone in the industry, even in competing firms, just kept this secret for years without anything leaking out?
It doesn’t seem plausible that this wasn’t known about and ignored by regulators in at least some regions.
I would like to think that now, after the scandal, they are selecting and testing cars that have recently been sold. The cars that are actually being driven around.