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Comment by _DeadFred_ | Hacker News Reader

Someone floated on here that the punishment should be partial government ownership stakes instead of weak fines. It doesn't syphon off funds and risk damaging important national companies that are 'too big to punish'. Instead it dilutes shareholder value and DIRECTLY impacts the company owners. It also gives the government an inside place in the company which no company wants to deal with. If a company doesn't change ultimately the owners lose ownership.

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That sounds like a terrible idea because it would progressively "bribe" the government to be in their interest to take the company's side as they gain more and more of it. Combine it that conflicts of interest with the appearance of improprirety and another conflict of interest of making expropriation of the successful a temptation.

The latter could be even more disasterous long term. Nobody wants to go out to dinner with cannibals or show up at the stores for fear of being eaten. Likewise being known as an expropriating country, you may as well go ahead and embargo yourself.

Proof that solutions exist, if we want them. Whatever the cause of the apparent impunity of large corporations and rich people, it is not a lack of workable solutions. See also fines proportional to income, which now exist in multiple countries.

I wonder if you could require the company to licence all its IP for free within the country. So that the brand and designs could still exist.

VW already is owned by the German state of NRW (20% of the voting rights, 11.8% of the equity)

Not exactly. Volkswagen headquarters are located in Wolfsburg which belongs to the German state of Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen). NRW, or officially abbreviated NW, is the state of North Rhine-Westphalia (Nordrhein-Westfalen).

Therefore it's Lower Saxony that owns some parts of Volkswagen.

VW is owned by the Porsche family. Audi also shortly owned it. Audi creates the engines for VW, because VW by itself can create nothing much by itself.

Porsche Automobil Holding SE owns about 53% of the voting rights, but only about 35% of the assets, so technically they do not own VW, they just control it.

Audi never owned Volkswagen. Volkswagen has owned Audi since 1964. What is true is that there has been an attempt of Porsche AG (the sports car company, not the capital holding) to take over VW in the late 2000s, but got switcheroo'd and instead taken over by VW.

While Audi does build some engines for VW (especially in the higher-tier sector, which arguably is more of an Audi thing to begin with), VW itself produces engines itself (to name a few, the TSI-, TDI- and TGI-series of engines).

Now, does VW build good cars? It's a hit and miss. I personally drive a New Beetle, and will probably continue to drive it for years, the thing is build like a tank and reliable to a fault. Then you have models that are ... not something I would like to drive.

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