Mexico fines Volkswagen for selling cars without environmental certificates

Volkswagen has been fined 168 million pesos (8.9 million U.S. dollars) in Mexico for selling nearly 45,500 vehicles without the required environmental certificates, the country's environmental agency said Monday.

In a press release, the Federal Attorney for Environmental Protection (Profepa) slammed Volkswagen for intentionally selling Audi, Bentley, Porsche, Seat and Volkswagen cars without complying with the country's environmental rules.

Profepa inspectors detected the breach of rules during a visit to Volkswagen last December when they checked information about the company's vehicles, according to the release.

The inspection found that the company had imported and sold 45,494 vehicles without the required certificates that involve two official Mexican norms that establish emission limits and noise limits for new vehicles.

Profepa said the fine was unrelated to the ongoing investigation by the federal government into whether Volkswagen's diesel-powered cars, sold in Mexico between 2009 and 2015, contained unauthorized software that could obscure emission measurement.

In September, the U.S. authorities revealed that the German automaker had equipped its cars with a type of software that manipulates the measurement of emissions from diesel-powered cars. This has led many governments to check whether such a technique is applied to cars sold in their countries. Endi