Stephen Weil, Lower Saxony’s prime minister and a Volkswagen supervisory board member, said that there is ‘legitimate concern’ on the part of the public, US authorities and the company itself for a comprehensive investigation, adding that it is in VW’s interests to provide clarification.

Meeting the deadline would see the carmaker make good on its promise to report the roots of the emissions scandal during its annual shareholders' meeting on 21 April.

Legal hires

The company hired US law firm Jones Day at the beginning of October last year to help probe the origins of the cheating and a few weeks later took on Daimler AG’s compliance chief, Christine Hohmann-Dennhardt, to oversee integrity and legal affairs. It followed that in December by commissioning Ken Feinberg in the US, who ran funds to provide restitution to victims of GM’s faulty ignition switches and BP’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, to run a similar program over claims related to the diesel emissions. Sources: Bloomberg BNA; Tech Times