Keystone-SDA
The Paris prosecutor’s office required on June 25 a third trial for aggravated deception in the dieselgate scandal against the French manufacturer Renault. He intervenes after those already requested against Volkswagen and Peugeot-Citroën.
(Keystone-ATS) The diamond brand is suspected of having “specially calibrated” EURO 5 and Euro 6 standards vehicles marketed between 2009 and 2017 so that they respect the regulatory parameters during approval tests but not in normal situations, according to the requisitions of which AFP was aware of this Friday.
This alleged deception is aggravated by the fact that this calibration has favored atmospheric pollution to nitrogen oxides, “promoting in particular the appearance in humans of respiratory diseases”.
The final decision on a trial belongs to the investigating judge, in this file which has been the subject of abundant technical exchanges and several expertise.
When he was indictment, in June 2021, Renault had challenged any aggravated deception and had assured that he had always complied with the standards in force.
Renault’s “Assumed Strategy”
For the prosecutor in charge of this file, however, “all the declarations of the teams working on the design of diesel engines within the SAS Renault tended to demonstrate that the objective in terms of depollution was to ‘pass the standard’, by limiting de facto ‘the standard’ in the approval protocol” while “this standard should also be applied to the normal conditions of use of the vehicle”.
This “assumed strategy of optimizing the operation of the depollution and long -term bodies” has been taken in a “collegial” manner, assures the public prosecutor.
At this stage, there are 381 civil parties in the procedure, individuals, associations, public persons, including the cities of Paris, Lyon, Montpellier or Grenoble as well as private companies.