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MUNICH (dpa-AFX) - Former Audi CEO Rupert Stadler is set to become the first Volkswagen Group board member to confess to fraud in the sale of diesel cars with spared emissions values. With a simple "yes" Stadler confirmed on Wednesday before the Munich Regional Court that he would make a comprehensive confession. The Economic Criminal Chamber had promised him a suspended sentence for this.

The public prosecutor's office also agreed to the plea bargain. The plea bargain proposed by the Economic Criminal Chamber had thus been reached, presiding judge Stefan Weickert stated. He intends to announce the verdict in June.

According to the chamber's assessment, Stadler should have realized by July 2016 at the latest that the exhaust gas values of the large Audi diesel engines could have been manipulated. Instead of getting to the bottom of the matter and informing the dealers, however, he had allowed production and sales of the cars to continue until the beginning of 2018. The court therefore threatened him with a prison sentence for fraud by omission - but at the same time offered him the prospect of a suspended sentence if he made a full confession and paid 1.1 million euros.

After five weeks to think it over, the 60-year-old Stadler has now agreed to the court's offer. He will present his confession to the court in two weeks, announced his defense attorney Thilo Pfordte.

For years, the former Audi boss had protested his innocence, emphasized his role as a clarifier and said he had been hoodwinked by his technicians. In the end, the defense and the prosecutor were still wrestling over the amount of the suspended sentence - prosecutor Nico Petzka had demanded two million euros. But with the plea agreement, the way is now open for a legally binding verdict, which will save the court an appeal and the other parties involved possibly years of further legal disputes. Thus, Stadler should soon leave the court as a convicted fraudster, but a free man.

The three co-defendants - the former head of Audi engine development, Wolfgang Hatz, and two of his senior engineers - have already confessed that they arranged for the engine software to be designed. With inadmissible defeat devices, the cars complied with the nitrogen oxide limits on the test bench, but not on the road. In this way, the carmakers wanted to save themselves the costly retrofitting of larger Adblue tanks for exhaust gas purification.

The proceedings against an engineer who had already appeared as a key witness four weeks ago had already been discontinued by the chamber. One after the other, his boss Giovanni P., Audi engine boss and later Porsche board member Hatz and former board chairman Stadler agreed to the suspended sentence of between one and a half and two years offered by the court to all three. Only in the case of Hatz did the public prosecutor's office reject a plea bargain and demand a prison sentence.

Rupert Stadler had become head of the Ingolstadt-based VW subsidiary in 2007, succeeding Martin Winterkorn, who moved to the top of the group at the time. Under Stadler's leadership, Audi had doubled sales and operating profit and overtaken Mercedes in sales figures. When U.S. authorities uncovered the trickery in VW diesel engines at the end of 2015, and a little later in large Audi diesel engines in models for the U.S. market, he thought he was safe for a long time. When German Transport Minister Alexander Dobrindt accused Audi in mid-2017 of having sold cars with defeat devices in Europe as well, Stadler reacted with emport.

Then came the crash. From June 2018, Stadler was in custody on suspicion of collusion - for four months, until his resignation as Audi CEO and VW board member. He has since paid 4.1 million euros to the Volkswagen Group for breach of duty.

Four former top managers of the Volkswagen Group have been on trial in Braunschweig since September 2021 for possible fraud in the diesel scandal. The proceedings against former VW Group CEO Winterkorn are on hold due to illness./rol/DP/jha