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Volkswagen programmed diesel cars to cheat emissions tests, exposing 11 million vehicles worldwide

Volkswagen Group TDI diesel engines and emissions-control software 2010s Fraud & Cover-Ups Archive: verified 5/5 wildness

The Volkswagen emissions scandal became public on September 18, 2015, when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued the automaker a Clean Air Act violation notice. Volkswagen had installed engine-management software known as a defeat device in approximately 11 million turbocharged direct-injection diesel vehicles worldwide, including about 482,000 sold in the United States from model years 2009 through 2015. The software detected laboratory testing conditions and activated emissions controls, while ordinary driving produced nitrogen-oxide emissions as much as 40 times the U.S. legal limit. Volkswagen had marketed the vehicles as environmentally responsible and received green-car subsidies and tax benefits tied to their apparent compliance.

The deception was uncovered after the International Council on Clean Transportation commissioned West Virginia University researchers to conduct portable, on-road testing in 2013. Their results, published and reported to U.S. regulators in May 2014, showed Volkswagen Jetta emissions exceeding legal limits by factors of 15 to 35 and Passat emissions by factors of 5 to 20. After regulators confronted the company, Volkswagen acknowledged the manipulation in September 2015. CEO Martin Winterkorn resigned, and several senior engineering executives were suspended. Volkswagen agreed in June 2016 to pay up to $14.7 billion in U.S. civil settlements, pleaded guilty to criminal charges in January 2017, and was ordered to pay a $2.8 billion criminal fine in April 2017. By June 2020, the scandal had cost the company approximately $33.3 billion in fines, settlements, buybacks, and penalties; Winterkorn was charged with fraud and conspiracy in the United States on May 3, 2018.

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Volkswagen programmed diesel cars to cheat emissions tests, exposing 11 million vehicles worldwide

Archive Record · 2010s

03 / The Archive

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687 stories in this selection. Showing 1–6 of 687
01

Fraud & Cover-Ups2000s

Jiang Yanyong Exposed China’s SARS Case-Count Cover-Up and Faced Retaliation

Chinese government; SARS reporting system

During the SARS outbreak in late 2002 and early 2003, mainland Chinese authorities drastically understated the number of reported cases. On 4 April 2003, PLA General Hospital chief physician Jiang Yanyong sent an 800-word letter to CCTV-4 and Phoenix TV asserting that military hospitals were treating far more SARS patients than the government acknowledged. After the letter was leaked, The Wall Street Journal interviewed Jiang on 8 April, and Time published the translated account under the headline “Beijing’s SARS Attack.” The disclosure prompted the resignation of Beijing’s mayor and China’s minister of public health on 21 April 2003, after which the government began addressing the epidemic more openly. Public-health experts credited the change with helping prevent SARS from reaching pandemic proportions. Jiang later faced state retaliation: he was placed under military custody in June 2004 and released on 19 July, and friends reported de facto house arrest after he criticized the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown in a 2019 letter to Xi Jinping. He received the 2004 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service and died on 11 March 2023.

Archive: verified ↗
02

Fraud & Cover-Ups1980s–2020s

Apotex threatened confidentiality action after researcher warned patients about deferiprone risks

Apotex and deferiprone

Toronto hematologist Nancy Olivieri participated in research on deferiprone, an iron-chelation drug for thalassaemia, beginning in 1989; the work included a clinical trial partly funded by Apotex. During the trial, she became concerned that the drug was ineffective for some patients and reported those concerns to the research ethics board and Apotex. The board instructed her to inform participants, but Apotex disputed her interpretation of the evidence and argued that a confidentiality agreement barred disclosure. In 1996, the company threatened legal action if she warned patients; Olivieri disclosed her concerns, and Apotex ended its part of the study. In 1998, Olivieri and seven co-authors published further findings in the New England Journal of Medicine, reporting that deferiprone was associated with progressive hepatic fibrosis. The conclusions were later challenged using data from Apotex-conducted trials, and the drug was approved in more than 50 countries, including the United States through the FDA's accelerated-approval program in 2011, but not in Canada according to the source. A Canadian Association of University Teachers investigation also found that researcher Gideon Koren had anonymously sent disparaging letters about Olivieri; DNA evidence linked him to the letters, and he was reprimanded. Olivieri received the AAAS Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility in 2009 and the John Maddox Prize in 2023.

Archive: verified ↗
03

Fraud & Cover-Ups1987–1996

Canadian drug regulator Michele Brill-Edwards challenged alleged suppression of prescription-drug risks

Health Canada drug-approval system; Michele Brill-Edwards

Michele Brill-Edwards led Health Canada drug approvals from 1987 to 1992 and became a prominent whistleblower over what she said was the agency’s suppression or overruling of scientific concerns about prescription-drug risks. The supplied account identifies her as a physician and clinical pharmacologist, and says she took a Health Canada director to federal court after scientific decisions on drug safety were allegedly overridden. In 1992, the Federal Court ruled in a case brought by Brill-Edwards against her employer. The dispute had professional consequences: according to the source, Brill-Edwards was demoted and ultimately resigned from Health Canada in 1996. A 2005 national whistleblower award recognized her for continuing to challenge drug-safety decisions. She later represented the Alliance for Public Accountability during media coverage of Canada’s tainted-blood scandal and appeared as the central figure in a CBC The Fifth Estate episode portraying her as opposing Health Canada, pharmaceutical interests, and physicians whom the program alleged had supported keeping a drug on the market despite warning signs in Canada, the United States, and Britain. The court case and career history are established in the supplied account; the broader conspiracy allegations remain attributed claims rather than independently established findings.

Archive: verified ↗
04

Fraud & Cover-Ups2020s

AIIB communications chief resigns, alleging Chinese Communist Party influence over bank operations

Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB); Bob Pickard

In March 2022, Canadian public-relations executive Bob Pickard became the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank’s director general of communications. In June 2023, he abruptly left China and publicly resigned after alleging that the Chinese Communist Party exerted undue influence over the bank’s everyday operations, undermining transparent governance and producing what he called a “toxic culture.” Pickard said the political influence extended beyond ordinary shareholder oversight and argued that the institution could not be credibly reformed while the party sought to undermine Western democracies. He later repeated those claims while testifying before a House of Commons committee on Canada-China relations. The allegations triggered a formal Canadian response. Ottawa froze its participation in the AIIB in June 2023 and began reviewing Canada’s membership; in December 2023, the Finance Ministry expanded that review to examine the bank’s investments, governance, and management frameworks, in consultation with other G7 countries. The AIIB’s own internal investigation reached the opposite conclusion, stating that it followed high standards of multilateral governance and found no evidence of undue influence over decisions by its board or management. As of June 2025, Canada’s investigation remained ongoing. Pickard also criticized the announced succession of AIIB president Jin Liqun by Zou Jiayi, a Chinese Communist Party Central Committee member, as evidence of continued political placement in international institutions.

Archive: verified ↗
05

Fraud & Cover-Ups1980s

Civil Servant’s Leak Exposed Britain’s Secret Plague-Bacteria Trials and Falklands War Deception

Operation Cauldron; Ministry of Defence; Clive Ponting

In July 1984, British Ministry of Defence official Clive Ponting sent Labour MP Tam Dalyell two classified documents about the 1982 sinking of the Argentine warship ARA General Belgrano during the Falklands War. The documents, later nicknamed “the crown jewels,” contradicted government statements about the circumstances of the attack. Ponting was suspended without pay and charged on 17 August 1984 under Section 2 of the Official Secrets Act 1911. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher ordered his pay reinstated after being briefed on the case. Ponting argued that giving the documents to Parliament was in the public interest. A jury acquitted him despite the trial judge directing that it should convict, an outcome described at the time as a “perverse verdict.” After finding the surviving file on Operation Cauldron, secret 1952 biological-warfare trials in which a trawler was accidentally sprayed with plague bacteria off the Hebrides, Ponting also confidentially alerted The Observer; its July 1985 report called the incident a “germ bomb” test. Ponting resigned on 16 February 1985. The Conservative government subsequently amended official-secrets law, and the Official Secrets Act 1989 removed the public-interest defense that had aided his acquittal.

Archive: verified ↗
06

Fraud & Cover-Ups2010s

Independent review condemned Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust’s treatment of mortality whistleblower

technology

In July 2012, Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust suspended employee Sandra Haynes-Kirkbright after colleagues accused her of bullying, harassment, persistent swearing and unprofessional conduct. Haynes-Kirkbright disputed the allegations and claimed that the trust had concealed high mortality rates. Her whistleblowing allegations, and the way she was treated afterward, were investigated by the NHS Trust Development Authority while she remained suspended on full pay. The supplied account does not establish that mortality data were deliberately falsified, so that allegation remains attributed rather than proven. In May 2016, an independent review by employment lawyer Lucy Scott-Moncrieff, commissioned by then Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, condemned the trust’s handling of the case as “significantly flawed” and “unfair.” The episode exposed failures in governance, whistleblower protection and the management of serious patient-safety allegations inside an NHS provider. It also followed wider concerns about the trust: in December 2013, a Care Quality Commission inspection cited staffing problems, and NHS England recorded three of 148 reported “never events” at the trust between April and September 2013. The lasting consequence was official scrutiny of the trust’s procedures, although the source provides no finding that the alleged mortality concealment occurred.

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