VW and GM's Opel Return to Court in Ongoing Industrial Espionage Case

11/20/96

Reuters has reported that GM's Adam Opel and Volkswagen will return to a German appellate court as the GM-Volkswagen industrial espionage case continues. The Frankfurt court will decide this week whether results of a recently completed German investigation into GM's allegations of spying should be handed over to the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI.

The industrial espionage case as a whole comprises a civil suit in the U.S., investigations in Germany and the U.S., and lawsuits in German courts. The situation stems from an incident four years ago when excutive Jose Ignacio Lopez quit GM's Adam Opel to go work for Volkswagen. GM accused Lopez of stealing secret plans related to super-efficient manufacturing and taking them to VW.

Wolfgang Frank, the Frankfurt appellate court's spokesman, said that Volkswagen filed a lawsuit in the court which would keep information that German prosecutors collected concerning Lopez and other top VW executives out of the hands of U.S. investigators. U.S. authorities have been conducting a criminal investigation of the incident since 1993, shortly after Lopez left Opel for VW.

In addition to the Frankfurt's announcement of a date for the decision concerning whether to turn results of the German investigation over to U.S. investigators, VW said that a separate German labor court in Braunschweig set September 23, 1997 as the date for resuming review of the allegations Opel has made concerning the document theft.

In October VW lost a bid to have the U.S. lawsuit dismissed because of its similarity to the suit that is proceeding in the German labor court. The motion was denied, by a U.S. judge, but VW insists that the U.S. trial "will affect the credibility of Opel because their point is that they had to go to Detroit to seek justice."

In early November a Frankfurt court rejected VW's 10 million mark ($6.64 million) defamation lawsuit against statements that GM and Opel executives made about VW.

Paul Dever -- The Auto Channel