Volkswagen Group won’t sell brands to cover Dieselgate costs
The chairman of the Volkswagen Group has denied the company is planning to sell off some of its brands to help pay for costs related to the Dieselgate emissions cheating saga.
According to Reuters, Hans Dieter Poetsch, chairman of Volkswagen's supervisory board, has told Boersen-Zeitung that the company is "not thinking of selling parts of our brands".
Poetsch claimed that "the Volkswagen Group is financially solid and has many options for financing, and that is without extraordinary measures such as a capital increase, that is not being considered at this time".
Aside from the core Volkswagen brand, the Volkswagen Group also controls Audi, Bentley, Bugatti, Ducati, Porsche, MAN, Scania, Seat, and Skoda.
A Bloomberg report in June claimed that Volkswagen was investigating a sale of the MAN truck brand and motorcycle maker Ducati, as well as spinning off its components division into a separately listed entity.
The company has set aside 17.8 billion euros ($26.2 billion) to deal with Dieselgate-related costs, including fines, recalls, fixes, and litigation.
Volkswagen's chairman told the German business newspaper that he doesn't foresee a need to set aside any further money to deal with the scandal.
At the end of June, Volkswagen agreed to a deal with the US government that could see it pay up to US$14.7 billion ($19.3 billion) in compensation and fines for using software to cheat its way past emissions testing for around 500,000 diesel cars sold in the States.
All up, over 11 million vehicles worldwide featured defeat device code to illegally pass laboratory tests.
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