On 23 October this year, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) declared that the Volkswagen Act was not in line with European law, a decision which ratified an investigation initiated by the European Commission against the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) in 2003. This decision, however, was not entirely unexpected as there had been previous benchmark decisions by the ECJ in other member states of the European Union that declared similar provisions to be void.
The Volkswagen Act was enacted in 1960 as a compromise between various parties who claimed ownership interests in Volkswagen, including the FRG (to which the British High Commission had returned the company after the Second World War), the country of Lower Saxony (where the production sites were located) and the trade unions whose seized and plundered funds were partly used by the national-socialist regime to finance the first production sites.
