VW Reaches $912 Million Pact in German Car-Owners’ Mass Lawsuit

(Bloomberg) --

Volkswagen AG reached an agreement with German consumer group VZBV to settle claims from hundreds of thousands of diesel-car owners on its home turf who argued that their vehicles lost value in the wake of the emission-cheating scandal.

VW agreed to pay 830 million euros ($912 million) as part of the settlement, the company said Friday in an emailed statement. The talks had temporarily collapsed earlier this month before both sides resumed discussions to hammer out a deal after all.

The pact represents a “a fair and verifiable settlement solution,” VW legal chief Hiltrud Werner said in the statement. The company “will now do everything in our power to offer and make the one-time payments as quickly as possible,” she said.

The world’s largest automaker entered negotiations after the judges in the German court case last year urged both sides to consider talks. VW is facing a wave of litigation in Germany and elsewhere from drivers who want their money back for what they say is a loss of value in their diesel cars because of the software manipulation exposed by U.S. regulators in September 2015. More than 400,000 drivers signed up for the German test case, filed under a new law introduced in the wake of the scandal.

The diesel-emission scandal continues to haunt VW since it admitted more than four years ago that it used engine software in as many as 11 million diesel vehicles that was designed to bypass emission tests. The financial fallout has so far reached 30 billion euros in fines and other expenses for the firm.

The case is: OLG Braunschweig, 4 MK 1/18.

--With assistance from Karin Matussek.

To contact the reporter on this story: Christoph Rauwald in Frankfurt at crauwald@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Anthony Palazzo at apalazzo@bloomberg.net, Christoph Rauwald, Peter Chapman

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