Until the end of last week Herbert Diess looked “every inch the modern, global auto titan”, say John Arlidge and Jon Yeomans in The Sunday Times. However, the CEO of Volkswagen was evidently “too brash, too bold and in too much of a hurry for many of the company’s key stakeholders”. VW announced that he had been forced out three years before the end of his contract by a unanimous vote of the carmaker’s supervisory board. The move has upset many institutional shareholders, with analysts calling it “another illustration of dysfunction at VW”.
Diess’s departure was at least partly the result of “a series of public blunders”, says Joe Miller in the Financial Times. These include saying he was “not aware” of detention camps in China’s Xinjiang region and using the insensitive phrase “EBIT macht frei” at a company event. He also gained “notoriety” for his “skirmishes” with VW’s “powerful works council, which controls several seats on the company’s supervisory board”. Unions were particularly “angered” by his suggestion that the group had 30,000 excess staff and his complaints that Tesla employees managed to produce an electric car in just a third of the time it took VW.
Clashes with the workers
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