Police have raided Volkswagen’s main office in France in connection with the probe into the company’s rigging of emissions tests, a company spokeswoman said Sunday, reports The Wall Street Journal.
The raids, which took place on Friday but weren’t reported before Sunday, targeted the German car maker’s France headquarters in Villers-Cotterêts and a second office near Paris. “We cooperated with full transparency,” the spokeswoman said. A spokeswoman for the Paris prosecutor’s office said computer hardware was seized in the raids.
Similar searches have already been carried out at the company’s headquarters in Italy and Germany, showing its legal troubles are spreading across Europe as the emissions-cheating scandal shows no sign of abating. Volkswagen has set aside 7.3 billion dollars to deal with the fallout, a figure the company’s new chief executive, Matthias Müller, has said is expected to rise.
Europe’s largest auto maker faces investigations by European and US authorities as well as class-action lawsuits from aggrieved customers after admitting that it fitted 11 million vehicles world-wide with so-called defeat devices to cheat emissions tests.