French auto giant PSA Group, the maker of Peugeot and Citroen cars, on Thursday said its premises had been raided by France’s anti-fraud squad as part of a probe into emissions.
“As part of ongoing investigations on pollutants in the automobile sector, today PSA Group has been the subject of a visit and a seizure by France’s General Directorate for Competition Policy, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control,” PSA said in a statement.
The fraud squad said separately that the raid was prompted by harmful emission “anomalies” found in three PSA car models during pollution tests triggered by a Volkswagen emissions cheating scandal. Five PSA sites were raided, four in the Paris suburbs and one in Montbeliard, eastern France.
Photo: Reuters
PSA said it was cooperating fully with the directorate, which comes under France’s economy ministry, and confirmed the “compliance of its vehicles in pollutant emissions in all countries where it operates.”
Gilles Le Borgne, head of research and development at Peugeot Citroen, said the investigators took away computers, which he expected would be returned yesterday.
“We are being completely transparent ... We are clearly going to provide maximum collaboration,” he added.
Thursday’s raid comes three months after a surprise probe at Renault, France’s second-biggest automaker, as part of the government’s drive to shed light on emissions practices by car manufacturers in the wake of the global emissions scandal at Volkswagen AG.
The German company has admitted it installed illegal software into 11 million 2-liter and 3-liter diesel engines worldwide, including Volkswagen, Porsche and Audi models, that intentionally masked the vehicle’s real emissions levels during testing.
Volkswagen reached an agreement on Thursday with US regulators to offer US owners of about 480,000 illegally polluting diesel cars options of “substantial compensation” and to fix the cars, or to buy them back.
The offer, which will likely cost Volkswagen billions of dollars, also included creation of a fund for environmental protection, the company said at a court hearing.
In the latest scandal to rock the sector, Japan’s Mitsubishi Motors Corp on Wednesday admitted that it had also cheated, on fuel-efficiency tests. The shock statement sent stock market investors fleeing, wiping about US$3.2 billion off Mitsubishi’s market value in three days.
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