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Angela Merkel’s CDU party received donations from “Azerbaijan Laundromat’ scandal” Video

October 26, 2017 By administrator

azerbaijan laundromat scandal

Illustration by gagrulenet azerbaijan laundromat scandal

Germany’s CDU party has received donations from a state-run Azerbaijani company, a German media consortium reported. The affair again highlights links between conservative politicians and the Central Asian dictatorship.

A district chapter of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Party (CDU) received €28,000 ($33,114) from the state-run Azerbaijani oil and gas company Socar in contravention of German rules on party donations, a consortium of public broadcasters NDR, WDR and daily Süddeutsche Zeitung reported.

Read more: Azerbaijan laundromat scandal embroils ensnares German MP

The case again calls into question connections between certain conservative politicians and the South Caucasian republic, whose leader, President Ilham Aliyev, has by human rights organizations.

According to the report, two payments, one of €3,000 and one of €25,000, were deposited by Socar’s Germany-based branch on the account of the CDU’s district association in Frankfurt at the end of February 2012.

No fine for the CDU

The affair had caused a four-year-long legal dispute with the parliamentary administration authority behind the scenes, the report said, since German law prohibits parties from receiving donations from non-EU countries.

Aliyev: a stranger to democracy

‘Azerbaijan Laundromat’ scandal ensnares German MP

Although the district CDU branch accepted the donation without question, auditors at party headquarters in Berlin notified the Administration of the German Bundestag, which decided as early as autumn 2013 that the gift was not allowable under the law. The CDU then gave up the donation to be immediately impounded, the report said.

However, despite having broken the law, the party will not have to pay a fine, largely owing to a ruling made by an administrative court in April that self-denunciation in such cases can not only mitigate penalties, but even avert them altogether.

Mysterious links

The affair has raised several questions about links between the conservative CDU/CSU bloc and Azerbaijan, and what objectives the country could be pursuing with its donations.

The German CEO of Socar, Anders Egen Mamedov, was quoted by the paper as saying that the company’s contacts with political officials was taking place “against the backbround of the geopolitical importance of Azerbaijan and Socar,” including with regard to the pipeline network through seven countries that is currently under construction.

The massive gas pipeline project was chosen over the Nabucco-West pipeline in 2013 with the support of the then EU commissioner for energy, the German CDU politician Günther Oettinger.

Mamedov said Socar also made donations to sports and cultural associations in Germany. He declined to give details or speak about possible donations to other German of European parties to the paper.

Lobbying activities

The Süddeutsche also pointed to CDU parliamentarian Karin Strenz, who according to the paper did not disclose her work for an Azerbaijan-financed lobbying firm within three months as asked. The company is owned by former CSU politician Eduard Lintner, who has been doing lobbying work for Azerbaijan since 2009.

In another possible indication of her sympathies with the authoritarian country, in June 2015 Strenz voted against a resolution by the Council of Europe to call on Azerbaijan to release its political prisoners — the only German MP to do so, according to an earlier report in the paper.

Azerbaijan was described in a resolution by the European Parliament in September 2015 as “having suffered the greatest decline in democratic governance in all of Eurasia over the past 10 years.”

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Azerbaijani, Inside Europe, Laundromat, scandal

Netherlands: Fipronil in eggs: Dutch police arrest two suspects, contaminated egg scandal

August 11, 2017 By administrator

Police in the Netherlands have detained two men suspected of being involved in the illegal use of a pesticide in the poultry industry. Millions of fipronil-contaminated eggs have been recalled since the scandal broke.

Dutch prosecutors said in a statement on Thursday that the men are directors of a company that allegedly used an unauthorized insecticide at poultry farms.

Investigators in the Netherlands and Belgium made the arrests during a string of coordinated raids linked to their probe into how fipronil, which can be harmful to humans, made it into the food chain.

“The Dutch investigation focused on the Dutch company that allegedly used fipronil, a Belgian supplier as well as a Dutch company that colluded with the Belgian supplier,” the prosecutors said.

“They are suspected of putting public health in danger by supplying and using fipronil in pens containing egg-laying chickens.”

Authorities in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany recalled millions of eggs at the start of the month after the discovery of fipronil in batches delivered to supermarkets. Dozens of poultry farms, mainly in the Netherlands but also in Belgium, have been closed down, while supermarkets have cleared tainted eggs from their shelves.

The French agriculture ministry confirmed on Friday that 250,000 contaminated eggs had been “on the market” in France between April and July. Five companies using egg products were been involved. A first batch of 196,000 eggs from Belgium had been placed on the market between April 16 and May 2 and a second lot from the Netherlands of 48,000 eggs had been sold through Leader Price shops between July 19 and 28.

The insecticide is a common ingredient in anti-lice treatments, but it is banned from being used on animals destined for human consumption. Fipronil can be hazardous to humans’ kidneys, liver and thyroid glands, according to the World Health Organization, but only if consumed in large quantities.

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: contaminated, egg, Netherlands, scandal

Azerbaijani Spy Scandal Leaves Trail Of Dead Suspects, “wave of arrests on espionage charges”

June 16, 2017 By administrator

azerbaijan spy ScandalWithin days of being swept up in a wave of arrests on espionage charges last month, at least four Azerbaijani soldiers and a retired military officer died in custody. The circumstances of their deaths are shrouded in secrecy.

Azerbaijan’s government and military have refused to comment on the deaths, news of which emerged shortly after authorities in May announced the spy scandal.

Journalists who initially reported on the deaths have been warned by the Prosecutor-General’s Office to stop. And most relatives of the dead soldiers are reluctant to speak to journalists, with some expressing fear about their own safety if they do.

The silence, Baku’s poor human rights record, and the way Azerbaijan’s military hastily buried the soldiers without letting relatives see their bodies, have fed rumors that the suspects were tortured to death while being interrogated.

Spying For Armenia

The spy scandal came to light on May 7 when a joint statement was issued by the State Security Service, the Prosecutor-General’s Office, the Interior Ministry, and the Defense Ministry.

It said authorities had “opened a criminal case against a group of military personnel and civilians in Azerbaijan” on charges of “treason against the state.”

The statement said members of the spy ring had worked for the intelligence services of archrival Armenia “at various times in the past” and “for their own interest.”

It also said they provided “state secrets” to Armenia, which Azerbaijan has been locked in conflict with over Nagorno-Karabakh for decades. The two countries fought a bloody war in the 1990s over the breakaway region of Azerbaijan, which is populated mainly by ethnic Armenians and is now controlled by Armenian-backed separatists.

Secretive Arrests

Azerbaijan’s authorities have not named any individuals accused in the spy case or specified how many suspects were arrested and charged.

But Ilham Ismayil, a former State Security Service officer, told RFE/RL that a total of 42 people were arrested in raids during May — mostly in the Terter region.

Ismayil told RFE/RL that the spy scandal stemmed from an incident in late 2016 when a group of Armenian military officers allegedly were allowed to cross from Nagorno-Karabakh and travel behind Azerbaijan’s front lines with the help of Azerbaijani officers.

He said some Armenian officers were given Azerbaijani military uniforms to wear and that they traveled to the center of Terter — a city that was heavily damaged by Armenian forces during the Nagorno-Karabakh war in the early 1990s.

State Security Service chief Madat Guliyev said the roundup of spy-ring suspects was ordered by President Ilham Aliyev after investigators under Guliyev’s command provided evidence to both the president and the Defense Ministry. Based on that evidence, the Defense Ministry took action.

Neither the State Security Service nor Azerbaijan’s government has publicly disclosed the nature of the intelligence the suspects allegedly provided to Armenia.

And, so far, there have been no public court hearings for any of the suspects.

Suspicious Deaths

Yadigar Sadiqov, a politician from the opposition party Musavat, has suggested that the deaths in custody of so many suspects just days after their arrests is highly suspicious.

“We don’t believe they died of natural causes,” Sadiqov wrote in a May 20 opinion column for the Baku-based online newspaper Bastainfo.com.

Sadiqov also suggested many people in Azerbaijan assume the suspects were tortured to death, noting that “across social media, there are people saying the government was justified to torture and kill” them.

In each case, the suspects were detained in raids close to the contact line that separates Armenian-backed and Azerbaijani forces near Nagorno-Karabakh.

Within days, their dead bodies were returned to their home villages and buried by soldiers who did not allow relatives to see them.

Opposition media in Azerbaijan that have reported about the deaths and burials have been officially warned they would be prosecuted for revealing “state secrets” if they published any more information about the spy case that wasn’t officially released by state institutions.

With the exception of a cousin of one dead soldier who spoke only on condition of anonymity because he feared retribution from authorities, relatives of the deceased suspects have refused to talk to RFE/RL or other media organizations.

Amnesty International confirms that it has received complaints from sources within Azerbaijan alleging that the soldiers were tortured to death.

But Levan Asatiani, Amnesty International’s campaigner on the South Caucasus, says his organization cannot immediately confirm the torture claims because Azerbaijan has become a “closed country” that blocks the work of international human rights researchers.

“We have not been able to verify those reports regarding soldiers and torture in the military,” Asatiani explained. “But Amnesty International generally has concerns about torture and ill treatment in Azerbaijan — specifically in the penitentiary institutions and the detention facilities.”

He said Azerbaijan has a well-documented history of using torture to induce false confessions from political prisoners who are lawyers, journalists, and opposition activists.

“You could say that the use of torture is a trend in Azerbaijan,” Asatiani said.

Hasty Burials

Namized Safarov, a Baku-based human rights lawyer, told RFE/RL that a retired military officer named Saleh Qafarov was arrested on treason charges in early May at his village of Aydinqyshlaq in the Gabala region.

Safarov said Azerbaijani soldiers returned Qafarov’s body four days later for burial in the village, but Qafarov’s relatives never saw his remains and were not allowed to attend the burial.

Since then, Safarov said, Qafarov’s family has faced “heavy harassment” from other villagers angered by the treason allegations. Qafarov’s children have been expelled from school.

Imran Cabbarov, the head of the local government in Aydinqyshlaq, confirmed that Qafarov died in custody.

“He died and was buried,” Cabbarov told RFE/RL. “Only law-enforcement bodies can talk about it. If he committed such a crime as treason, it would serve him right.”

Bastainfo.com and the Berlin-based independent website Meydan TV reported similar circumstances when the bodies of other suspects in the spy case were returned to their villages.

Temkin Nizamioglu, a 24-year-old lieutenant from the Ordubad region near Azerbaijan’s southern border with Iran, was one of at least three active military officers reportedly arrested in the case.

Nizamioglu was buried in his village of Darkend by Azerbaijani soldiers who returned his body.

“It’s true that his body was brought to the village for burial, and according to the soldiers who brought him, he had heart problems and died in a hospital,” the village’s municipal chief, Raqib, said.

The body of officer Elcin Quliyev was delivered for burial in his town of Terter on May 18 shortly after he was arrested in the spy case.

A cousin of Quliyev, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Meydan TV that the soldiers who returned his body didn’t give the family any details about the cause of his death.

“They just said they were investigating the issue and would inform us about the cause of his death when that investigation is finished,” the cousin said.

Mehman Huseynov, a military officer from the village of Agkend in the Terter region, also died in custody within days of being arrested in the spy case.

Local residents refused to allow Huseynov to be buried in the village cemetery because of the treason accusations against him.

Meydan TV also reported that a 32-year-old soldier named Elcin Mirzaliyev was buried in his village of Shalig in the Ucar region, within days of being arrested in the case.

That report said Mirzaliyev died on May 25 and was returned to his village the next day by soldiers who buried him without allowing relatives to see his body or attend his burial.

The head of Shalig’s municipality, Arif Ahmadov, confirmed that Mirzaliyev was buried but would not give any details about the cause of his death.

There have been anonymous claims on social media that other Azerbaijani soldiers have died in custody after being arrested for treason in the spy scandal.

RFE/RL could not confirm the veracity of those reports or attest to the reliability of the sources.

Written by RFE/RL correspondent Ron Synovitz, with reporting from RFE/RL’s Azerbaijani Service.

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Azerbaijan, scandal, spy

Obama implicated in Clinton email scandal – New FBI docs

September 24, 2016 By administrator

obama-implicatedPresident Barack Obama used a pseudonym when communicating with then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by email, while her IT company referred to her email deleting as a “cover-up”, new FBI documents reveal.

The heavily-redacted documents, almost 200 pages, include summaries of interviews with senior Clinton aides concerning the private email server, and brings to light details previously unknown.

During the interview with Huma Abedin, who served as deputy chief of staff under Clinton, the FBI reportedly presented her with an email exchange between Clinton and a person she did not recognize. The FBI then revealed the unknown person’s name was believed to be a pseudonym used by Obama. Abedin reacted by saying, “How is this not classified?”

This exchange could expose Obama as having mislead the public on the issue, given his 2015 statement that he found out about Clinton’s use of a private email server “the same time everybody else learned it, through news reports.”

The State Department will not make public the emails Clinton exchanged with Obama, citing “presidential communications privilege,” as reason to withhold the emails under the Freedom of Information Act, Politico reports.

FBI report reveals that Obama used a secret pseudonym to send emails Clinton and these emails ended up on her private server.

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) September 24, 2016

The documents also include interview notes with other senior Clinton aides; Cheryl Mills, Jake Sullivan and former Bill Clinton advisor Justin Cooper, who registered the clintonemail.com domain. Romanian hacker Guccifer and a number of state department officials were also interviewed.

The latest FBI document cache also refers to the engineer who used BleachBit to permanently delete emails from Clinton’s server soon after the House Benghazi Committee issued a subpoena for documents relating to the 2012 attack on the US embassy in Libya. According to the engineer, he did this “of his own accord based on his normal practices as an engineer.”

Documents show employees from Platte River Networks, the IT company who managed Clinton’s emails, referring to a request to wipe emails in 2014 as the “Hilary [sic] cover-up operation”. An employee told the FBI this was a joke.

Clinton aide, Bryan Pagliano, said concerns were raised about whether Clinton’s server created a “federal records retention issue” by state department officials in 2009 or 2010. When he communicated these concerns to Mills, however, she said that Clinton’s  predecessor, Colin Powell, had also used private email.

The reports further reveal Clinton’s alleged ineptitude with technology, with aides claiming she “could not use a computer,” and didn’t know her email password.

Abedin said she had two computers in her State Department office, one for unclassified communications and another for classified communications. She did most of her work on the unclassified computer and would go “days or weeks without logging into the classified system.”

One redacted interviewee described himself as a “Clintonista” and said he has a relationship with the Clintons dating back years. He said he would meet with Clinton four or five times a day and initially traveled with her until she was comfortable with the position of secretary of state.

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Clinton, email, FBI, implicated, Obama, scandal

Azerbaijani Ambassador to Latvia recalled after scandal

January 28, 2016 By administrator

azerbaijan scandalPresident of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev signed a decree on recalling the Azerbaijani Ambassador to Latvia Elman Zeynalov, the Azerbaijani President official website reports.

Earlier, haqqin.az wrote that the Corruption Prevention and Combating Bureau of Latvia is investigating the criminal case into the wife of Ambassador Zeynalov, Nazira Zeynalova, who tried to give a 500 euro bribe to the inspectors to get a driving license.

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Ambassador, Azerbaijan, scandal

France: NATIONAL FRONT Revival of Turkish accession to the EU: “The continuing scandal”

December 15, 2015 By administrator

Paris, December 15, 2015 (AFP) – The National Front Tuesday denounced in a statement “the scandal” of the relaunch of the accession process of Turkey to the EU, with the opening of a new chapter in accession negotiations. “It is a democratic and unprecedented political scandal,” said the party led by Marine Le Pen.

“Indeed, this opening comes as we get every day the very serious confirmation that Turkey indeed trade with the barbarians of the Islamic state. After oil smuggling, and several news sources just revealed that 25,000 tons of cotton in 15 days were imported by Turkey from Syria “, says the FN, who sees a” double game abject of the Turkish state ” .

“Recall that the opening of a new negotiating chapter is part of a broader agreement in the context of the crisis of migrants, which already provides for the payment of 3 billion euros to Turkey and liberalization visas for Turks wishing to come to Europe, “laments the FN.

“Brussels is pursuing its policy blindly crazy with regard to Turkey, despising the way that European public opinion overwhelmingly reject the accession of this country to the European Union. Worse, the European Commission also threatens our collective security, always incorporating a little more to the EU a state that plays with the security of the world, through its reports for the least problems with the Islamic state “s’ unworthy even the far-right party.

As promised, the EU has relaunched Monday accession negotiations with Turkey, which it expects better cooperation on migration crisis and increased struggle against the organization including drying Islamic state in the lucrative oil trade jihadists.

Tuesday, December 15, 2015,
Ara © armenews.com

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: accession, EU, scandal, Turkish

BFP Report- The Hastert Scandal & Turkish connection What the Media Isn’t Telling You Video

October 14, 2015 By administrator

hastert-scandalBy Sibel Edmonds | October 14, 2015

A scandal too deep, too dark, and covers too many people from both sides of the political aisle for it to ever proceed in public

When former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert was first indicted, the mainstream press treated it as a story of a long-ago transgression that has long since been swept under the rug. But a series of revelations from FBI whistleblowers reveal that this story is just the tip of a very seedy iceberg, one that implicates Hastert, his top aide, other Congress members and government officials in a criminal network involved in sexual intrigue, foreign espionage, blackmail, and drug money…

*Information on Dennis Hastert and ‘others’ are also covered in my books Classified Woman & The Lone Gladio. For this campaign, until October 31, we are offering both e-books under $2. Please spread the word; for truth & integrity.

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: connection, Hastert, scandal, Turkish

Washington: Office of Congressional ethics releases findings on Azerbaijani travel scandal

October 8, 2015 By administrator

Office of Congressional Ethics releases 70-page report and over 1000 pages of finding on Azerbaijan travel scandal case

Office of Congressional Ethics releases 70-page report and over 1000 pages of finding on Azerbaijan travel scandal case

Contact: Elizabeth S. Chouldjian

WASHINGTON, DC – Over the ongoing objections by the House Ethics Committee, the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE), today, in a bold move, released its entire 70-page report and over 1,000 pages of findings from its investigation into secretive Azerbaijani government funding for Congressional participation in an extravagant 2013 Baku conference, reported the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA).

In a statement released today along with its investigative documents, the OCE explained “Respectful of the principles of transparency and accountability in the House ethics process, and with assurance that it will not prejudice any action by the Department of Justice, the OCE Board has voted to release the nine referrals, including the Findings of Fact, as permitted by section 1(f)(1)(B) of House Resolution 895.” This action by the professional staff of the OCE came over the objections of the House Ethnics Committee, which is comprised of sitting members of Congress, including those who continued receiving campaign contributions from donors connected to the Azerbaijani oil industry during the course of this investigation.

“We applaud the Office of Congressional Ethics for their principled stand for government transparency and accountability,” said ANCA Chairman Ken Hachikian. “This bold move trumps those who would keep information from the American people, ensuring that all U.S. citizens have full access to deeply troubling information regarding to a foreign dictator’s efforts to manipulate our democratic system.”

The decision on whether or not to release the report has been an ongoing source of tension between two Capitol Hill ethics bodies – the House Committee on Ethics (Ethics Committee) and the OCE.

On July 31st, the Ethics Committee provisionally cleared 10 U.S. Representatives and over 30 Congressional staff who had been under investigation for allegedly accepting illegal foreign funding to participate in a 2013 conference, funded by the State oil company of Azerbaijan (SOCAR): “U.S.-Azerbaijan Convention: Vision for the Future.” The Ethics Committee found that the Members had not knowingly violated the law, since the nominal funders of the trip – the Assembly of the Friends of Azerbaijan (AFAZ) and groups associated with the Turkic American Association (TAA) – had apparently concealed from the Congress the fact that SOCAR was, in reality, the true source of the junkets’ financing. The Ethics Committee then referred the case to the Department of Justice, but – in a move that generated international media attention – refused to release the OCE findings. The findings of the OCE, an independent, non-partisan entity charged with reviewing and, as appropriate, referring allegations of Congressional misconduct to the Ethics Committee, are typically released to the public after the close of each investigation. By all accounts, an exception had been made in this instance, at the insistence of Committee members, to keep these findings secret.

In an August 3rd letter to House Ethics Committee Chairman Charles Dent (R-PA) and Ranking Member Linda Sanchez (D-CA), ANCA Chairman Ken Hachikian called for the release of the findings “in the interests of government transparency and the rights of a fully informed electorate.” He stressed: “The Committee should not withhold from American citizens any information involving foreign attempts to manipulate our democratic system or that, in the Committee’s own words, reveals ‘evidence of concerted, possibly criminal, efforts’ by any party – foreign or domestic – seeking any manner of undue influence with U.S. policymakers.”

The ANCA encouraged supporters of transparency in governance to call the House Ethics Committee at (202) 225-7103 to urge it to release the 70-page OCE findings.

The controversy surrounding foreign funding of the Azerbaijan trips first came to light in July, 2014, in an in-depth article published by the Houston Chronicle, which prompted the Ethics Committee to begin review of the matter.

The Washington Post, in May of this year, first revealed the existence of the OCE report in a major investigative article titled, “10 Members of Congress Took Trip Secretly Funded by Foreign Government“.

In August, after the Ethics Committee report was released, the Center for Responsible Politics published an in-depth article spotlighting donations by supporters of the Turkic American Alliance to Chairman Dent, titled “Ethics Chair Received Contributions from Donors Linked to Groups in Azerbaijan Probe.”

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Azerbaijan, ethics, scandal, Travel, Washington

Meet John German: the man who helped expose Volkswagen’s emissions scandal Report The Guardian

September 26, 2015 By administrator

VW-carsAutomative engineer’s research connected the dots to how the automaker manipulated diesel emissions tests – but that was never the intention

John German has barely had time to catch his breath all week between appearances on TV news channel and radio phone-in shows. He’s an unlikely media star, not a pop singer or reality TV contestant, but a grey-haired automotive engineer thrust into the global spotlight after he and his colleagues were credited with helping uncover one of the biggest ever corporate scandals.

“We really didn’t expect to find anything,” German said of his research that found Volkswagen had installed sophisticated software designed to cheat strict emission tests across the world. His simple test – checking the car’s emissions on real roads rather than in lab test conditions – led to the resignation of VW’s chief executive after the German company was forced to admit it installed “defeat devices” in 11m cars. The scandal has wiped more than €24bn ($26.8bn) off VW’s market value.

Many questions remain but one thing is clear to German: “It was not an accident,” he said. “A lot of work has gone into this.”

When German finally found a moment of peace this week he called his wife in Ann Arbor, Michigan. “She said: ‘You know you’ve made it now, you can retire and be very happy’,” German told the Guardian as he prepared to board a plane back to Michigan after a week in the spotlight in Washington DC. “No, no, no, I can’t afford to yet,” German told his disappointed wife.

He may have helped uncover one of the world’s biggest corporate scandals, but German earns a modest salary as US co-lead of the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) a small nonprofit organisation dedicated to helping to reduce vehicle emissions and has an annual budget of just $12m.

“It has been totally overwhelming,” German said of the global interest in his research this week. “I’ve been doing nothing else [but responding to the media and politicians] for 12 hours a day since Friday,” when US regulators announced their findings against VW based on German’s research] “We’re a small organisation that primarily deals with information on diesel filters, so this is unprecedented and overwhelming.

“As an organisation that is trying to reduce emissions and improve efficiency it is always gratifying to see results from our work, but we never dreamed we would have this kind of impact.”

German explained that the idea to carry out the test, which he described as “very ordinary”, came from Peter Mock, a colleague in Europe, who noticed discrepancies in the emissions of the diesel VW Passat and VW Jetta. He said they decided to carry out on-the-road tests in the US as the emissions regulations are much stricter than in the EU. They expected the cars to pass and they could use this as proof to show Europeans that it was possible to run diesels with cleaner emissions.

German, who has a degree in physics from the University of Michigan and said he “got over halfway through an MBA before he came to his senses”, sought out the assistance of the West Virginia University’s Center for Alternative Fuels, Engines and Emissions. The WVU provided a portable emission measurement system that could be put in the car’s boot (trunk) with an attached probe placed in the exhaust pipe.

Then German sourced a Passat, Jetta and a BMW X5 (which also showed emissions discrepancies in Europe) and “had a drive around”. “The VWs were massively exceeding their official emissions readings in normal driving conditions, which was completely inexplicable and totally surprised us,” German said.

Thinking it must be a technical error, the tests were expanded and the cars were driven more than 1,200 miles from San Diego to Seattle – almost the entire length of the west coast of the US.

The VWs nitrogen oxide emissions – which creates smog and has been linked to increased asthma attacks and other respiratory illnesses – still exceeded the US standards by up to 35 times. The BMW X5 was within the regulated range.

Arvind Thiruvengadam, a research assistant professor at WVU, who conducted the tests said: “We were doubting ourselves and our procedures and making sure to double check that we were not doing anything wrong. We did so much testing we couldn’t possibly doing the same mistake again and again.

“We were like ‘OK, we’re going to write a lot of journal papers, and we’ll be happy if three people read these journal papers,’” he told National Public Radio last week. “That’s our happiness at that point.”

German published the research in May 2014 and handed it over to the Environment Protection Agency (EPA). “There was an expectation that they would find out what was causing the higher-than-expected emissions,” he said. “We did send a courtesy copy to VW to say ‘vehicles B and C are your vehicles and you might like to know’, we had no response.”

There was no response from the EPA either, but keen-eyed German noticed an EPA press release in which VW agreed to recall almost 500,000 vehicles in December 2014 to reinstall software, which it said would solve the higher-than-expected emissions.

However, a couple of months later the California Air Resources Board (Carb) carried out spot checks and discovered that the “defeat device” software – used to dramatically reduces nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions only when the cars are undergoing strict emission tests – was still present.

“That is actually the single most inexplicable thing about this whole business,” German said. “VW had a chance to fix the problem, and they continued to try and cheat and do what they had done. That’s just amazing.”

“Only then did VW admit it had designed and installed a defeat device in these vehicles in the form of a sophisticated software algorithm that detected when a vehicle was undergoing emissions testing,” the EPA said in a statement last week.

German said it was unclear how the defeat device software worked, but the software could work by detecting periods when the steering column wasn’t turning but the wheels were which would indicate the car was on dynamo-meters for testing, or could also test for the precise uniform temperature that the tests are carried out at.

“The kind of software it takes to first detect when you’re driving on the official test would be very hard to develop. And then you would need duplicate software to tell the car to have two different emission controls.”

He said it was impossible to know how far up the food chain at VW the fraudulent activity went, but said: “It would have had to be quite a few people involved. It certainly won’t have just been one individual.”

German said VW could have continued in the deceit for the foreseeable future if no one had thought to test the cars emissions on real roads. He said there is no way to know if other car companies may also have been using similar methods to trick official emission tests, but welcomed UK, German and US regulators moves to retest cars emissions on real roads.

German, who drives a 1997 Honda Accord station wagon that he says has pretty good emissions for a manual transmission, said he hopes his work will act as a wake-up call and scare the whole industry into making certain that their vehicles comply with all emissions regulations. “Companies should realise they might get away with stuff for a little while, but it will catch up with them.”

He refused to enter into discussion about what sort of action should be taken against VW, which is facing a fine of up to $16bn in the US alone and a possible criminal investigation. “That’s really up to others, I’m just an engineer from Michigan it’s really beyond my field of reach.”

Source: the Guardian

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: emissions, Germany, scandal

Breaking news: Scandal at Eastern Partnership summit

May 22, 2015 By administrator

f555f0e9ba0ec8_555f0e9ba0f03.thumbThe EU Eastern Partnership Summit in Riga was interrupted all of a sudden after Azerbaijan refused to sign the agreement, disagreeing with provisions regarding Nagorno-Karabakh.
Italian President Sergio Matarella, who chaired the meeting, declared a break, Tert.am’s source reports.
Azerbaijan move has spurred disappointment among the EU countries attending the summit.

Filed Under: Articles, Events Tagged With: Armenia, Azerbaijan, eastern, Partnership, scandal

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