Lawyers are planning to bring together dozens of owners of Volkswagen Golf gasoline models that were equipped with emissions cheating software so they can file a class-action lawsuit against Volkswagen headquarters in Germany, sources from Chosun Newspaper said yesterday.
Barun Law said Sunday it also plans to file fraud charges against the German carmaker after prosecutors here found that Volkswagen hid the truth from its customers.
Last Friday, prosecutors said they obtained an e-mail and testimony showing that Volkswagen headquarters ordered its Korean office to manipulate the emissions software in the seventh-generation Golf 1.4 TSI. More than 1,500 units of the model have been sold here since March last year.
The Volkswagen scandal that erupted last year has so far been limited to diesel cars, but the Golf 1.4 TSI is a gasoline model.
The law firm is already suing Volkswagen here on behalf of 4,400 owners of Volkswagen diesel cars.
"We don't think it will be difficult to prove fraud because headquarters' intentions are explicitly revealed in the e-mail," a Barun spokesman said.
Lawyers also said they will petition the Environment Ministry to carry out a checkup of all Volkswagen cars sold here and order Volkswagen headquarters in Wolfsburg to replace all its customers' vehicles with new ones.
Meanwhile, a U.S. federal court in San Francisco is set to reveal a damages compensation plan for American Volkswagen customers on June 28, a week later than originally planned.
