Dieselgate drags on for embattled Volkswagen as the first mass lawsuit of its kind gets underway in Germany. Some 450,000 are looking for compensation having been being sold cars based on misleading emissions data.

This just a week after German prosecutors charged Volkswagen's chief executive Herbert Diess, former boss Martin Winterkorn and supervisory board chief Hans Dieter Poetsch with market manipulation. Shareholders should have been informed about the investigation into the devices as soon as they had learnt of it, not after the scandal broke in 2015 when the damage to stock prices had been done.

In the four years since the scandal first made news, it has cost VW £26.6bn. This latest development may itself be in the courts for another four years.

Similar class action claims have already been brought in the US and Australia.

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