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My heart was as heavy as a field of butterflies in spring when the news lobbed on Monday that high-level [LOOK LEFT] cocks in Wolfsburg had signed off on allowing their inconsequential Arse-tra-alien subordinates to bend and stretch their way to a class-action settlement in the time-honoured game of prison shower Twister. Yesssss!

Ze Chermans will kick the tin for up to $127.1 million for Dieselgate class action victims, who own (or owned) the company’s disgraceful, filthy shitheaps.

If you’ve been dead from the neck up since about 2015, Dieselgate was, of course, the board-level criminal conspiracy, in which a decision was taken to kill people prematurely in the name of profit, by cheating emissions regulations and pumping up oxides of nitrogen in Volkswagen dung-box diesel exhausts.

Oxides of nitrogen kill about 50,000 people annually in Retardistan. If you read the peer-reviewed study in respected academic journal, Environmental Pollution, you’d see they estimated fraudulent Dieselgate emissions causing 45,000 disability-adjusted life-years to be lost, at a cost of $39 billion US dollars (and that’s just in ‘Murica).

Dieselgate has now cost Volkswagen more than 30 billion Euros, in total, and several high-level Volkswagen and Audi arseholes have gone to prison. Others, of course, parachuted out onto their wallets, fortuitously to live happily ever after, presumably in a hot tub full of Veuve Cliquot. And high-class hookers. In countries that don’t extradite. And, let’s face it - if you’re going to be in prison, that’s how to do it.

Even more of a side-splitter for me: Volkswagen, Audi and Skoda are doing this “without admission of liability”.

I ask you: Could they actually harbour some hope against hope of looking any less like morally adrift mother-lovers? In fact, those disingenuous Volkswagen ‘Straya arseholes said, in a statement, that the $40 million (wriggle room) settlement would be a:

“...significant step towards fully resolving the diesel lawsuits in Australia.”

I guess that’s true - except for the people who became disabled because the excessive NOx gave them some life-limiting cardiovascular disease. But, really, who cares about them?

The company droned on, seemingly without end:

"The settlement, on a no-admissions basis, concerns five class-action lawsuits covering all affected vehicles in Australia. Volkswagen expects the proceedings will be concluded in 2020."

If only Volkswagen, Audi and Skoda cars were as reliable as their corporate bullshit. Here’s my problem with this ‘zero admission of liability’ caper:

If the cops kick in your door at 3am, they zip-tie you at gunpoint and tell you they think you really did kill all those children, and the Department of Public Prosecutions agrees, you get two basic options:

One: Plead ‘guilty’ and go straight to sentencing. Two: Plead ‘not guilty’ and go to trial, where your guilt (or not) is established.

What you specifically don’t get to do, when some dude in a wig says: “How do you plead?” Is get in wig-man’s face and argue: “Maaaate, look, I’m not sayin’ I killed all those schoolgirls, right - but just gimme … I dunno ... 8.7 to 12.7 years, we’ll sort that out, and that’ll be the end of it. I think you’d agree that’d be a significant step towards fully resolving this mutually inconvenient issue.”

And yet - that’s kinda what’s happening here.