One pot for misled investors, one child rape forensics KC for the disabled man they pulped internally.
Cheques For Those With Coverage
Cummins has quietly agreed to let a 1.6 million dollar shareholder settlement go forward in Indiana. The allegation is simple enough. A shareholder said Cummins told the market it did not use defeat devices while stuffing defeat devices into Ram truck engines on a scale big enough to earn a record 1.675 billion dollar Clean Air Act penalty.
Now, with help from a mediator, the investor class gets an “immediate and favourable recovery”. You do not need a conscience for that. You just need a calculator, some risk counsel and a fear of headlines that say “lied to investors” instead of “technical emissions issue”.
The emissions scandal went global. So did the regulator penalties. Now the shareholder clean up begins. Of course Cummins pays. That is just the cost of staying in the right stock indices.
No Conscience, Just Case Management
This is not reparations. It is not remorse. It is case management dressed as contrition. Fucking hell, they still haven’t even apologised to the world. “No bad faith” is an odd line from a company continue to write cheques.
Cummins did not wake up one morning and discover a moral centre. It discovered Bloomberg Law. It discovered the words class action and securities fraud. It discovered that if the story hardens into “board misled investors about defeat devices” you get a governance crisis, not a temporary share price wobble.
So the company does what any big listed outfit does. It slices off a manageable sum, gets the mediator to call it “favourable”, and moves on to the next claim. False platitudes on page one, numbers on page two.
This is probably the opening act for a whole run of copy-paste settlements. Same scandal, new docket, fresh cheque. Remember, they accept no wrongdoing though. Let’s not misrepresent what these huge cheques are, my friends. Just an innocent lean clean green diesel machine paying vast sums for nothing. Run of the mill behaviour.
Who Gets The KC
Now put that next to how they behave when there are no cameras, no global scandal and no Wall Street class to mollify.
For investors they deceived, Cummins finds 1.6 million dollars and a mediator. For the disabled man they deliberately beat to a pulp inside their own process, they find something else entirely – a child rape forensics KC with a track record of defending the worst crimes available in the criminal calendar.
One side gets a negotiated payout on a spreadsheet. The other gets an elite courtroom weapon pointed at his head.
That is not accidental. It is the entire corporate hierarchy of whose pain matters. Markets get managed. The disabled ex-employee gets treated like a threat to neutralise (good call, by the way), not harm to repair.
Media Narrative, Not Moral Reckoning
Look at the story arc.
- Record Clean Air Act penalty for almost a million doctored Ram engines.
- Press releases heavy on “cooperation” and “moving forward”.
- A shareholder suit quietly settled for seven figures.
- Sombre quotes about accountability and compliance.
This is the perfect media narrative. Massive fine, solemn promises, investors “made whole”. Everyone gets to pretend the system works. Meanwhile the human being they broke in private is still staring at the same legal wall, facing the same KC who built a career around getting men accused of child rape and other headline crimes safely through the fire.
Cummins is not suddenly in the business of atonement. It is in the business of tidying up anything that might spook the Street while unleashing maximum force where there is no camera and no class action press release.
If It Had Stayed Quiet
The real test is simple.
If the defeat devices scandal had never hit the news, if there had been no EPA announcements, no justice department pressers, no journalists saying “largest Clean Air Act penalty in history” – would these investors be getting a penny.
Of course not. They would be getting exactly what you got. Delay. Denial. Silence. Maybe a letter about how “the company has seen no evidence that anyone acted in bad faith”.
The only reason there is 1.6 million on the table is because someone shone a light on the emissions fraud so bright even Cummins could not spin out of it. There is no new ethical standard here. There is only a different level of exposure.
Two Systems, One Company
So park the idea that this is some great turn in Cummins moral journey. What you are looking at is the same machine behaving exactly as designed.
- When the harm is public and priced, pay the market and move on.
- When the harm is private and messy, bring in the KC who got men accused of child rape and the worst offences you can imagine safely through trial, and use that firepower on a disabled claimant with no coverage.
That is the split screen. One side gets carefully calibrated settlements and soothing lines for analysts calls. The other gets crushed, then blamed, then told that “justice” is whatever the corporation and its barristers say it is.
Everything else is just wallpaper.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project