Former Volkswagen works committee chief Klaus Volkert was sentenced to two years and nine months in jail Friday for his role in a 2005 corruption scandal that hit Europe's biggest carmaker.
Volkert's sentence — for incitement to commit a crime and abetting fraud — is the toughest handed down yet in the criminal trials spawned by the scandal.
He signalled immediately that he would appeal against the sentence.
His lawyer said Volkert has been made to take the fall in the corruption and bribery scandal after more senior executives were handed suspended prison sentences.
“This is a crude case of class justice,” Johann Schwenn told reporters outside the court in Brunswick in western Germany.
If the appeal fails, Volkert will become the first VW employee to serve jail time over the affair that saw executives use a slush fund to pay for the services of prostitutes and exotic trips for union leaders.
The illicit handouts were designed to ensure peaceful labour relations at the company.
Volkert was sentenced alongside former Volkswagen personnel chief Hans-Joachim Gebauer, who was given a suspended prison sentence by the court in Brunswick and who also plans to lodge an appeal.
The trial in the western city was the third to flow from the scandal.
In December, former VW head of human resources, Peter Hartz, was given a two-year suspended sentence and ordered to pay a hefty fine after acknowledging he had approved around 2.6 million euros (3.8 million euros) in payments to Volkert, who is also a former trade union leader.
Hartz, the architect of extensive German labour market reforms, avoided prison under an agreement struck with the prosecution that saw him give full testimony and admit paying bribes.
The Brunswick trial has seen former VW boss Ferdinand Piech, now head of the car giant's supervisory board, testify that he was unaware of the corruption network that had operated within the group for years.
The Volkswagen scandal and another at engineering giant Siemens has tarnished the image of German business and called into question its central principle of co-determination whereby labour representatives make up half of a company's supervisory board.
The latest sentences in the VW affair come as Germany is reeling from allegations that hundreds of businessmen but also sport stars and entertainers put billions of euros into secret trusts in Liechtenstein to avoid paying tax.
