Audi chief executive Rupert Stadler was arrested Monday in connection with parent company Volkswagen's "dieselgate" emissions cheating scandal, with prosecutors saying they feared he might try to suppress evidence.
The dramatic development comes a week after Munich prosecutors raided Stadler's home after charging him with fraud and falsifying documents that allowed diesel vehicles equipped with cheating software to be sold to European customers.
Four police officers detained the Audi boss at his home at between 6 and 7 am, a spokesman for Munich prosecutors told AFP, saying that the arrest was justified as he is suspected of "seeking to influence witnesses or other suspects".
Stadler has denied the accusations and has said he is ready to be interrogated from Wednesday, added the spokesman. Hours after the arrest, the VW group's management named Dutchman Bram Schot, who joined VW in 2011, to take over from Stadler as interim CEO. Stadler is the most senior executive yet to be detained in the dieselgate crisis, which started when the Volkswagen group admitted in 2015 to installing so-called "defeat devices" in some 11 million diesels worldwide that made them seem less polluting in lab tests than they actually were on the road.
The affected vehicles involved VW's own-brand cars, but also those made by Audi, Porsche, Skoda and Seat. VW's luxury subsidiary Audi has long faced suspicions that its engineers helped create the software used in the scam. Audi's former head of engine development, Wolfgang Hatz, was taken into custody in Germany in September 2017 and remains behind bars. A manager at Porsche was also detained in April. He was identified by German media as Joerg Kerner, an engineer in charge of Porsche's engine division who was working at Audi when the diesel scandal broke.
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