Breaking: This is Crazy. The Toyota scandal is growing.
From The Hill:
A top committee chairman wrote Toyota executives Friday asking for answers as to whether the company failed to turn over safety records in litigation.
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.) wrote Toyota North America President and CEO Yoshimi Inaba demanding to know whether the Japanese automaker, when facing lawsuits for vehicle rollovers, failed to turn over a so-called “Books of Knowledge” as required under law.
Towns said that an Oversight committee subpoena of Toyota documents indicate that the company failed to turn over the Books of Knowledge, which detail design and testing data, during the discovery phase of liability lawsuits against the company…
Here is an excerpt from the letter Congressman Towns sent to Toyota North America. The full letter is at the link above.
In an internal memorandum dated September 1, 2005, entitled “A Serious Need to Get Documents/E-Discovery From TMC”, Mr. Biller [ Toyota Managing Counsel in the Product Liability ] informed his supervisor that he was concerned about Toyota’s failure to produce electronic documents in litigation. While conducting a search for relevant evidence in the “Sears” case, Mr. Biller discovered a computer database known as “MIK”. According to Mr. Biller, MIK had been in existence for a number of years and includes information about “design problems” and “countermeasures used to resolve issues.” The MIK database can be searched by vehicle and by component part. Moreover, the information in MIK is maintained by Toyota Motor Corporation (TMC). Information from MIK “is down loaded by TTC [Toyota Technical Center] into secret electronic “Books of Knowledge.”
