In the first major legal action against General Motors (GM) over
its record number of recalls this year, Arizona's attorney general
on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against the auto maker claiming it had
defrauded state consumers of an estimated $3 billion, The New York
Times reported Thursday.
In its filing, the state broke from a group of 48 state
attorneys general who had launched a multistate investigation into
GM's decades' delay in recalling an ignition-switch defect in 2.6
million of its small cars.
"We're proceeding with our own suit because it's the best way to
protect the citizens of Arizona," Attorney General Thomas C. Horne,
said in an interview.
"General Motors represented that it was taking care of the
safety of its cars, and in fact there were serious defects that it
did not disclose to the public for years," he said.
The complaint suggested, the Times said, that GM had
intentionally misled consumers in its advertising, website and
public statements and that some of its top executives were
complicit in the alleged misdeeds.
The complaint included precise calculations of losses suffered
by owners of G.M. cars and said "no reasonable consumer" would now
buy a GM vehicle for the same price had "the brand continued to
mean safety and success," the report said.
Full story at
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/20/business/arizona-sues-gm-for-3-billion-over-recalls.html?_r=0
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