[MikeHolman]

I'm sure this isn't something at the exec level, but it seems possible someone somewhere in middle management who oversaw used van sales wanted to increase their revenue numbers and thought cheating the odometer would be an easy way to boost their numbers.

[Alupis]

It's not even clear if FedEx has anything to do with this. The other named defendant is "Holman Fleet Leasing", which seems to imply these vehicles were leased to FedEx.

If that's the case, then any possible scandal here would be squarely on the company selling the vehicles - not FedEx.

FedEx might just be a tacked-on name. You see that quite often with Prop 65 cases. The plaintiff attorneys add anyone even remotely related to the case, just to drive up pressure and chaos, hoping for quicker/larger settlement offers.

In this situation, even if FedEx has nothing to do with vehicles sales, they might opt to settle and write a check just to make the bad publicity go away. If you think that sounds like a shakedown, you'd be right.

[fatfingerd]

In a civil case this is the right thing to do. Chances are good that a company as large as FedEx very closely met with leasing providers and discussed how they were going to get those costs down, better than if FedEx didn't lease. The lawyers would be silly not to fish for signs that FedEx knew a bit about why it could get the leasing rates it wanted.

[Alupis]

I have no doubt the leasing company would factor in re-sale value of the vehicles... that's how all vehicle leases work.

I do doubt FedEx would be in any way involved in the details of selling leased vehicles. I can say with a high degree of confidence there never was a meeting with FedEx execs where they pitched the idea of increasing residuals by swapping odometers...

[fatfingerd]

That's not really necessary. It sounds unlikely to me that there wouldn't be a paper trail with someone in FedEx's procurement about such a project, particularly if this really included FedEx racking the miles on the new odometer.

A project to cut an ongoing vendors costs is about the only way for a large cap procurement specialist to meet and exceed targets with no possibility of additional valid free market bids. That opens them right up to questions of liability, with managers knowing or avoiding knowledge, workarounds, special advice to other divisions, etc.

You don't have to go to jail to lose a lawsuit.. I worked for a company that put together a whole system for reporting these kinds of ethics irregularities in the companies favor. I don't think that was a charity, they act as a defense or at least lower punitive damages a judge is likely to award when violations still occur.

[joshAg]

There's actually a legal reason for tacking on anyone who is plausibly liable. The basic idea is to sue everyone in a single case and let the court sort out actual liability for each party as part of that single case.

Say the lawsuit is originally against just Holman Fleet Leasing and FedEx is the one legally liable (Maybe FedEx is the one that is doing something naughty. Maybe there's some contractual language around Fedex assuming all legal liabilities for the vehicles sold.). You're going to spend a bunch of time in court arguing with Holman about if they're even the right party to sue, and your case is either going to get thrown out or you're going to lose. Meanwhile, the statute of limitations is still ticking, so if it takes a long enough time to adjudicate the case against Holman, you won't even be able to refile the same case with the correct respondent. Oops. but if the statute of limitations miraculously hasn't run out yet, that's not even considering the possibility that the kind of person who would roll back an odometer would also have a punishingly short document retention policy, so all the documents that still existed at the time you filed against Holman have long since been shredded and destroyed, so your discovery in the new case against Fedex is going to be a single email saying "yeah, we don't have anything going back that far. Oops again.

Now consider the lawsuit filed initially against both Holman and Fedex. Assuming your list of respondents is complete, the case isn't going to get thrown out because you sued the wrong person. Liability will still be adjudicated (and the case amended to drop respondents as the proper liability holder gets determined), but now you don't need to worry about the statute of limitations running out as you wait for the determination of liability against the first respondent. And the document retention clock starts with that lawsuit and covers the time where you're just determining who hold liability, so now they can't delete those documents even if they other wise would be. Both of them are now going to be legally required to retain all the stuff you list in discovery for the duration of at least their involvement in the case. Sure, they could destroy those records anyway, but that sort of thing is regularly used to infer guilt of the respondent with the worst possible inferences when it's destroyed in violation of discovery.

[Alupis]

These things never see the inside of a court room. It'll end up as a settlement check, with none of the involved parties admitting to anything. The lawyers will then move onto the next low hanging fruit.

I've learned over time, it doesn't matter how righteous your defense is - all that matters is the money it'll cost to make the issue go away. Turns out, it's almost always cheaper to write a check than defend yourself.

[KennyBlanken]

> It's not even clear if FedEx has anything to do with this.

A company the size of FedEx has accountants and actuaries watching leases of this scale like hawks. It's simply not believable that Fedex never "noticed." And if they noticed they were getting much better than normal resale values but didn't ask why, that's very much the definition of complicity.

[Cthulhu_]

Well yeah there's that, but it can't have been just one person; there's at least dozens of people involved in the trading and maintenance of these things, there's paper trails for the purchase and I presume installing and replacing of the odometers; there's bound to be loads of people that are in the know, and since the true odometer reading can be read from the onboard computer, I find it really hard to believe that nobody caught this before.

It would've taken just one case of a mismatch between the digital and physical odometer without it being mentioned for a huge stink to be thrown up. And it'd also be the auction house's name on the block, because they should check these things themselves. If this is as widespread as they claim it to be, then even the occasional spot checks would show it.