Michael Lewin Solicitors prepares VW mass litigation as car manufacturer says that only a few employees are responsible for emissions scandal

Michael Lewin Solicitors has become the latest firm to announce that it is preparing a mass litigation case against VW, while the car manufacturer has claimed that only a few employees were responsible for it rigging US and EU emission tests.

According to Richard Coulthard, a director at Michael Lewin Solicitors, the firm has received a “huge number of calls” from concerned VW, Audi, Skoda and SEAT owners since news broke that VW had cheated its way passed the US Environmental Protection Agency.

“We are in the process of contacting both Volkswagen and Patrick McLoughlin, UK Transport Minister and to express our concern that a trusted company like Volkswagen could have done such a thing and threatened our environment,” said Coulthard.

“We have set up a specialist team to take calls from owners, process claims and to collect evidence, and we are now beginning the process of putting together a Litigation case against VW.”

He added that it was the firm’s role to uphold consumer protection laws and to ensure that its clients were “not out of pocket after the purchase and operation of their vehicles”.

We expect that some of the settlement agreements could be sizeable for our clients that are affected by this,” he said.

Meanwhile, it has emerged that VW believes that only a handful of employees are to be blamed for the scandal.

Michael Horn, the chief executive of VW US, gave evidence to the House of Representatives energy committee in Washington D.C. earlier this week, saying that a couple of engineers had managed to set up a device to cheat the testers.

The company’s new chairman, Hans Dieter Poetsch, has also said that it would take some time before it could work out the exact details of how it began cheating diesel emission tests.

Paul Willis, the UK managing director of VW UK, will appear before the Transport Select Committee in Parliament on Monday.

Mark Dugdale