Greed, Guile & Lies

Some of the world’s most respected corporations have gone out of their way to deceive us. Here’s how they got caught.

- Derek Burnett

Theodore Roosevelt, who battled the excesses of the Gilded Age, was always careful to point out that he was not hostile to corporations; rather, he was “endeavoring to do away with any evil in them.” Sorry, Teddy, but wrong doing has not been expunged. The past few decades alone have seen the lies of tobacco companies exposed, Enron and Tyco collapse under the weight of malfeasance, and financial institutions that cooked the books lead us into the Great Recession. You might think that today’s large corporations would have learned from such misdeeds. As these companies show, you’d be mistaken.

VOLKSWAGEN: CHEATED TO BEAT EMISSIONS TESTS

THE PITCH: Volkswagen promised consumers that its diesel-engine cars were not only fuel efficient but also clean enough to meet U.S. Environmental Protection Agency air-quality standards. American consumers scrambled to get behind the wheel of Volkswagen’s “green diesels,” which combined high fuel economy, great performance, and the cachet of driving an eco-friendly European vehicle.

THE HITCH: American air-quality standards are very different from those in Europe. European emissions standards are more focused on greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, primarily) and fuel economy, while U.S. standards are aimed at limiting smog and adverse health effects, so they target six principal pollutants, such as particulate matter and carbon monoxide. To span this divide, Volkswagen developed a secret sauce that allowed models to pass the EPA’s test.