Will the arrest of an engineer in Ferrara for the Dieselgate make Stellantis cry?
In the province of Ferrara, an executive of VM Motori, a company of the Stellantis group, wanted by the United States for the Dieselgate scandal, was arrested. All the details
On Monday evening in Vigarano Mainarda, in the province of Ferrara, Sergio Pasini, a fifty-three-year-old engineer from Ferrara was arrested. Last March, an international arrest warrant was issued by the United States for the "Dieselgate" case, which broke out in the end of September 2015.
WHO IS SERGIO PASINI
Pasini had been arrested for a simple check of the documents, during which however the arrest warrant against him emerged. He is in prison in Ferrara, writes the local newspaper Nuova Ferrara , in provisional detention in view of a possible extradition to the United States.
Pasini is an executive in the Research and Development sector of VM Motori, an engine company based in Cento, in the province of Ferrara, belonging to the Stellantis group. VM Motori focuses on diesel engines, those – as the name suggests – at the heart of the Dieselgate case.
THE CASE OF DIESELGATE
The Dieselgate scandal, which started in the United States in September six years ago, concerns the manipulation of diesel engines carried out by some car companies – especially the German Volkswagen – with the aim of evading vehicle emissions controls.
The EPA, the United States Environmental Protection Agency, found that several car models sold between 2009 and 2015 emitted much higher quantities of nitric oxide (up to forty times as much) than the maximum limits. allowed. These diesel engines were able to "trick" the controls through a specific software installed in the control unit which, in short, "hacked" the emissions data making them lower than the actual ones. The scandal led to the withdrawal from the market of hundreds of thousands of Volkswagen diesel cars and their ban on sale in the United States.
In addition to Volkswagen, the Dieselgate also hit FCA (now Stellantis), which agreed to pay a sum of 800 million dollars to the American government. Peugeot and Citroën, both part of the Stellantis group, also ended up in the scandal – more precisely in the case opened by the French authorities.
THE ROLE OF VM MOTORI AND THE ACCUSATION TO PASINI
As reconstructed by Resto del Carlino , FCA is involved in the Dieselgate case in the United States for the sale of over one hundred thousand vehicles with "rigged" diesel engines. The engine under investigation – specifically, the three-liter capacity mounted on the Jeep Grand Cherokee and the Dodge Ram 1500 – was produced at VM Motori in Cento.
Pasini, currently suspended from his post, is accused of conspiracy to fraud, among other things.
THE OTHER MANAGERS INVOLVED
In addition to Pasini, Gianluca Sabbioni, manager of FCA and responsible for verifying the emission levels of diesel engines, and Emanuele Palma, engineer of FCA on trial in the United States are also involved in the investigation.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/smartcity/ferrara-ingegnere-caso-dieselgate/ on Wed, 29 Sep 2021 10:27:40 +0000.