That hadn’t been the line a few days earlier, when VW still thought it had a chance of beating back GM’s charges that Lopez illegally brought along a trunkload of GM trade secrets when he jumped ship last March. “I don’t see a peaceful end to this,” declared Piech, who has insisted that VW still stands by Lopez. “We’re in a mudslinging battle, and we intend to do what’s necessary to win.” But that was before a series of dramatic turns in the clash of the automobile titans. In Hamburg, prosecutors announced an investigation into whether VW executives, including Lopez, committed perjury in a recent court hearing. In Bonn, the Economics Ministry reportedly urged Lower Saxony to sell its 19.7 percent stake in VW, declaring that the state prime minister’s defense of VW management was inappropriate. And a spokesman for Chancellor Helmut Kohl told NEWSWEEK: “We hope and expect that this conflict will be terminated as quickly as possible.”
However it ends, GM has brutally punished VW for wooing away its former vice president, whose cost-cutting skills are so legendary he was known as “The Grand Inquisitor.” Volkswagen has ineptly struggled to mount a response to GM’s public relations assaults. What about those four boxes full of GM design secrets German police found in a Wiesbaden apartment occupied by associates of Lopez? Planted, Piech suggested at a press conference and in an interview with Stem magazine, by “a fourth set of hands”–not Lopez’s associates, not the German police, not the prosecutors who have the boxes now. Whodunit? “Other hands,” Piech said. “Maybe our opponents.” What proof could he produce? None, VW later admitted. But the company was checking its computer system to see if hackers had inserted GM trade secrets in an effort to make VW look guilty.
Detroit got a big kick out of the conspiracy theories. “We’ll give them all our secrets and then we’ll catch ’em with them,” proposed one GM headquarters executive last week. Even worse for Volkswagen, Germans were tittering as well. “Is Germany Dallas?” asked the sober weekly Die Woche, which published a poll showing that 69 percent of VW drivers think the allegations against Lopez are “believable.”
While its image is falling, Volkswagen’s chief says its profits are finally on the upswing. Piech predicted last week that his company will be back in the black by 1993’s third quarter after losing $773 million in the year’s first quarter. Piech credited Lopez’s controversial cost-cutting measures for much of the recovery. But despite his contributions to the bottom line, The Grand Inquisitor is coming to look more like a liability than an asset for Volkswagen–a development that surely has not escaped General Motors.
