It’s the biggest scandal in German industrial history: For more than ten years, automobile manufacturers and suppliers working for lots of different companies lied to consumers and authorities by deliberately manipulating the exhaust emissions of their vehicles. With catastrophic consequences: Almost 20 million car owners worldwide were cheated. The reputation of Germany’s car industry is ruined. And the consequences for human health and the environment are immense. In this investigative documentary, industry insiders reveal that this is the logical consequence of a culture of profit maximization at the expense of morality, decency and legality.
The background of the diesel scandal – how Germany’s carmakers and their suppliers deliberately developed illegal defeat devices, exploited legal loopholes and lied to consumers and control authorities for decades – is breath-taking. The main protagonists of our film are whistle-blowers fighting against powerful car bosses. An ex-engineer, an ex-manager, a lawyer – they all break their silence for the first time in front of the camera to reveal the criminal activities in Germany’s car industry.
We closely follow our protagonists and accompany them in their often very personal fight against injustice and cover-ups. The film concentrates on their personal accounts and interweaves news reports and official statements, and thus exposes the discrepancy between what we were lead to believe and what really happened.
They're bankers, traders, investment funds executives. They impoverished countries, drove millions of workers into unemployment, and triggered the rise in extremism. Ten years after the crisis, they tell their stories.
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For deliberately cheating the system, Volkswagen were made to pay a record $20 billion fine. But, as this investigation shows, they were far from the only culprits. We met the researchers who uncovered the cheat devise and investigate the dangers posed by NOx emissions.
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From the director of 'Goldman Sachs: The Bank that Rules the World' comes a major new investigation into corruption at one of the world's top financial institutions – HSBC.
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