The investigation is tied to an incident on an Alaska Airlines flight in early January. Boeing also told a Senate panel that it cannot find a record of the work done on the Alaska plane.
If it’s anything like other criminal inquiries in this country, they will find the lowest paid chump on the totem pole to pin all the blame on while the C-Suite once again walks away with Golden god damned Parachutes.
It’s optimistic to assume they’ll even bother finding someone in the company guilty even if it’s some low level chump. I don’t actually expect anyone to be found guilty in this whole thing. The only time corporations in this country actually suffer repercussions for their actions is when they cost shareholders significant money Enron style.
I think even this isn’t as hurtful to major shareholders - the ones that have decisionmaking power - as you’d hope. They typically have more information and pay more attention than the small fish. They’d offload their shares earlier, for longer, as to not disturb the price too much, leaving the remainder to hold the bag once shit hits the fan. The stock market enables that. They’ve extracted a shit ton of money by steering the company over the last couple of decades. The ones that would really bear the brunt are the shareholders that never had any decisionmaking power, and the company’s workers.
Oliver Schmidt was a senior executive at VW who was prosecuted for that. Yes, upper management did take a hit.
Was he an executive, or just a manager, or just an engineer? Articles (including those on the justice department website) aren’t clear about exactly what his role was. None of the actual executives holed up on DE have appeared to pay the price.
