Volkswagen's supervisory and management boards on May 11 recommended that shareholders ratify actions taken by the management board in 2015, since an investigation of the carmaker's emissions scandal had until then failed to uncover potential wrongdoing by senior managers.
The two boards said at the time that the proposed resolution was based on the condition that management board members were not implicated in wrongdoing.But prosecutors in Braunschweig, near VW's Wolfsburg headquarters, are now investigating former VW CEO Martin Winterkorn and VW brand chief Herbert Diess over whether they effectively manipulated markets by delaying the release of information about the firm's emissions test cheating. VW's supervisory board on Tuesday discussed at length the question of whether it should stand by its May 11 resolution, the person said, declining to be identified because board deliberations are confidential. A day before Europe's largest automaker is to hold its annual shareholders meeting, the board has chosen to back the recommendation because internal investigations of the scandal until now have shown that no former management board member was in serious breach of duties in 2015, the person added.Even Diess, the former BMW