A former senior Volkswagen manager Oliver Schmidt has been sentenced to seven years in a US jail and fined $400,000 following a guilty plea in the emission-cheating scandal. “It is my opinion that you are a key conspirator in this scheme to defraud the United States,” US District Judge Sean Cox of Detroit told Schmidt, according to Reuters. Schmidt, a German national who was in charge of VW’s environmental and engineering office in Auburn Hills, Michigan, was charged with 11 felony counts was facing up to 169 years in prison, but chose to plead guilty and agreed to be deported at the end of his prison term. US prosecutors charged eight current and former VW executives in 2015, six of whom remain at large, after the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) accused the world's biggest carmaker of cheating on emissions tests. The company settled with US authorities, agreeing to pay a $2.8 billion criminal penalty.