VW Admits It Had GM Papers : Documents Taken to Germany Were Never Distributed, the Auto Maker Says
FRANKFURT, Germany — For the first time since General Motors Corp. accused a former executive of taking confidential documents to Volkswagen AG, VW has conceded some GM documents were taken to Germany, but says they were never distributed at VW.
GM’s German subsidiary, Adam Opel, immediately welcomed the news on Sunday, saying that prosecutors investigating what GM contends is large-scale industrial espionage would find the VW statement “extraordinarily meaningful.”
“Opel welcomes the . . . late admission of VW’s supervisory board that confidential Opel documents were in the hands of VW employees,” Opel’s management board said in a statement.
VW acknowledged after a special meeting of its board of directors late Friday that former GM employees had brought with them documents that “may have been ascribed to GM and may have contained sensitive information.”
The German auto maker did not name the employees and said the documents were destroyed to prevent “any danger of their distribution at Volkswagen.”
GM claims that its former worldwide purchasing chief, Jose Lopez de Arriortua, and seven associates systematically gathered and then made off with piles of secret documents when they defected to Volkswagen this spring.
VW said in a statement that potentially sensitive documents were destroyed at its guest house in Wolfsburg, Germany, where the company is based, and in Wiesbaden, where German prosecutors last month found four cartons of GM documents in the apartment of a Lopez associate.
Volkswagen did not say when the papers were destroyed or what information they might have contained. VW spokesmen could not be reached Sunday for comment.
The VW announcement came after the board met for more than four hours in a closed-door session.
The meeting ended with company directors expressing faith in both Lopez and VW Chairman Ferdinand Piech, who hired the Spanish cost-cutting expert as his top deputy.
Piech suggested last week in an unusually bellicose public appearance that the GM documents found by Darmstadt prosecutors in the Wiesbaden apartment may have been planted by Opel.
The VW chief spoke of a “war between auto giants” and accused Opel of a “mudslinging” defamation campaign, a charge Opel vigorously denied in a statement released Sunday.
Opel said GM would refuse Piech’s request for high-level discussions until VW retracts its accusations. Opel charged VW with continuing to try to “conceal and trivialize” the theft of GM secrets.
The chairman of the Opel workers’ council, Rudolf Mueller, said Saturday in a radio interview that the increasingly ugly struggle between GM and VW is alienating potential car buyers.
“I myself have spoken with customers who say ‘I wouldn’t buy a car from a company that relies on such methods,’ ” he said.
Piech told reporters after the Friday night meeting that he expects VW to return to profitability during the second half of 1993, thanks in large part to cost-cutting measures introduced by Lopez.
Volkswagen lost $972 million in the first half of the year.
