However, the presiding judge of the 1st Civil Chamber, Stefan Bellin, considered the Bonn judiciary to be responsible and decided on Wednesday that the Wolfsburg car manufacturer must pay the city of Bonn 469,120.79 Euro plus interest in the dispute over 27 diesel vehicles affected by the so-called exhaust gas scandal.

In return, the municipality is to return the cars purchased for the city's fleet to Volkswagen. The city uses diesel vehicles from Wolfsburg for the fire brigade, the social welfare office, and the public order office, among others. 27 of these city cars are equipped with the so-called EA-189 engine.

As the engine was equipped with the manipulation software used by VW, the city council had sued the Wolfsburg company for 678,139.52 Euro in damages. "Through its conduct, the defendant has contributed to largely circumventing the regulations on exhaust gas measurement and classification into pollutant classes in the context of obtaining an EC type approval," the ruling states. In doing so, the Group had offended common decency.

The Chamber said in its resulting statement that the City of Bonn can demand that Volkswagen reverse the sales contract. However, the municipality must allow a certain amount to be credited for the use. From the purchase price for the 27 vehicles totalling 558,728.35 Euro, a compensation for use of 89,607.56 Euro was therefore to be deducted. However, in the opinion of the Chamber, the municipality cannot demand the costs for the conversion of parts of the vehicle fleet and leasing costs for individual vehicles, which were also claimed. These costs would also have been incurred if other vehicles had been purchased.

How high this compensation for use would ultimately be was still difficult to foresee at the beginning of the proceedings: The municipality had initially submitted "a disorganised volume of files", as Bellin put it at the time. Among other things, a Polo model that had been criticised could not be found in the files at all, and the purchase prices quoted for several other vehicles were not quite accurate.

At the start of the trial in the autumn, the responsible persons of the city of Bonn quickly organised a photo session in the garage of the Stadthaus and were able to provide the court with pictures of all the vehicles concerned together with the necessary data.

The plaintiff's attorney Tobias Ulbrich expressed his fundamental satisfaction with the verdict: "We welcome the fact that the Bonn Regional Court has clearly established the immorality of the consumer deception caused by the exhaust gas manipulation.“

Actually, Ulbrich continued, the Bonn lawsuit should have set a precedent, because not only private individuals but also municipalities had been harmed by the exhaust gas scandal. In his view, it is all the more incomprehensible that more cities and municipalities have not enforced claims for damages. Now the deadline for this has expired.

(Original text: Leif Kubik / Translation: Mareike Graepel)