Volkswagen former Chief Executive Officer Martin Winterkorn has stepped down from his post running the group’s Porsche SE holding, VW’s biggest shareholder, succumbing to pressure to cut his ties amid an investigation into cheating on emissions tests.
VW Chairman Hans Dieter Poetsch, who already sits on the Porsche board, will take over for Winterkorn on November 1, the Stuttgart-based company said in a statement on Saturday. The holding company, controlled by the Porsche and Piech families, owns more than half of VW’s voting shares.
While the Porsche-Piech family was initially willing to stick it out with Winterkorn, who resigned as VW CEO in September, labor leaders and the German state of Lower Saxony were pushing for him to leave so that the German automaker could make a fresh start following the admission of cheating on US emissions tests, people familiar with the matter said. The two groups have significant influence at the carmaker because Lower Saxony owns 20 per cent of the voting stock and labor officials hold half the seats on VW’s supervisory board.
"It’s a good sign but it comes very late," said Ferdinand Dudenhoeffer, director of the Center for Automotive Research at the University of Duisburg-Essen. "Anything else would have been unimaginable."
Talks are underway for Winterkorn to leave his remaining posts as chairman of VW’s publicly traded Audi brand and the group’s truck holding company, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the discussions are private.
Fallout from the cheating disclosure has since spread to encompass as many as 11 million cars around the world. Cleaning up the mess will cost much more than the 6.5 billion euros (US$7.4 billion) Volkswagen already set aside for the task, Winterkorn’s replacement as CEO, Matthias Mueller, has said.