Why has the EU let German car manufacturers off the hook?
Two billion? Five billion? Perhaps ten billion to make it a nice round number? For colluding on diesel emissions you might think the European Union would hand out a pretty stiff fine to the big German auto-manufacturers. After all, it has hit American tech giants with huge penalties for far lesser transgressions. Yet in the end, its response was predictable: the EU has largely let them off the hook. The reason? It turns out that protecting German auto manufacturers is what the Commission really cares about – and nothing else matters. According to Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s anti-trust chief, German manufacturers ‘possessed the technology to reduce harmful emissions beyond what was legally required under EU
