'Monkeygate' claims first (human) victim

The blooming monkey-gassing scandal that has engulfed Germany's top car-makers has claimed its first scalp at the Volkswagen Group.

The car-maker today accepted the suspension of Dr Thomas Steg, its head of external relations and sustainability. Dr Steg himself proposed the suspension.

Documents prove that Dr Steg, essentially the Volkswagen Group's chief lobbyist with the German government in Berlin, knew about the European Research Association for Environment and Heath (EUGT) gassing of 10 monkeys in the USA and 25 people at the RWTH University at Aachen, and that the company's legal department has approved the tests.

"We are currently in the process of investigating the work of the EUGT, which was dissolved in 2017, and drawing all the necessary consequences," Volkswagen Group CEO, Matthias Müller, said yesterday.

"Mr Steg has declared that he will assume full responsibility. I respect his decision," he said.

The swift reaction at Volkswagen is a far cry from Dieselgate, where it had to be dragged kicking and screaming by regulators to suspend a chosen few senior managers.

"The methods practiced by EUGT were totally wrong," Müller insisted on Twitter.

"All this shows me yet again that we have to take ethical questions more seriously and sensitively. In our company and as an industry. There are things you just do not do."

The suspended Dr Steg agreed, regretfully telling German newspaper Bild: "It had nothing to do with scientific advancement."

To make it worse, Germany's government knew about the gassings, with newspaper Handelsblatt reporting two experts from the project, which was funded by BMW Group, Daimler and Volkswagen Group, reported to the Bundestag's Diesel Investigative Committee in September 2016.

New revelations came to light about the tests yesterday, with Bild publishing the invoice generated for the Lovelace Respiratory Research lab after it paid $47,472.25 on behalf of the EUGT for 11 Macaque monkeys.

The monkeys were unknowingly breathing in fumes from a 1999 Ford diesel, then from a Dieselgate-cheater 2012 Volkswagen Beetle, all while watching cartoons.

The Beetle, incidentally, was driven to the test by engineer James Liang, who was sentenced to 40 months in a US prison for his role in the Dieselgate scandal.

The lead-up to the test on 25 people in Aachen was sufficiently troubling that the professor leading the experiment, Thomas Kraus, handballed the approval decision to the university's ethics committee.

They were subjected to up to three times the World Health Organisation's recommended maximum dosage of NOx as the three car-makers desperately tried to prove that their diesel emissions were not bad for city-dwellers to inhale.

The European Union's own research estimates that NOx causes about 72,000 premature deaths a year and that, including all exhaust gases from transport, domestic and transport avenues led to 432,000 premature deaths.

One of the two technical experts who reported the diesel investigation findings to the Bundestag has been identified as the former professorial chair of toxicology and environmental health at the Munich Technical University.

Professor Helmut Greim, who was on the German government's Protection of Mankind and the Environment committee, insisted diesel emissions were not harmful to humans.

"That is our information from animal testing," he informed the government panel, then went on to admit to the 25-person test in Aachen.

"Of course, it's short-term exposure," he told the politicians, "because you can't deliberately expose people to different concentrations for a long period of time."