Re: he was unaware of the "defeat device" @ Pascal
It's actually quite possible he was unaware of the way the engines cheated the system. It's not as if people never Lie to Management, and as CEO you're pretty much removed from the niggly details of how things get accomplished day-to-day.
Given the nature of the way the tests were dodged, and the fact the technique is essentially really, really simple, in a "no-one would believe anyone would ever do anything so blatantly obvious, because..", the blame must be sought in the development train of that particular engine type, not in top management.
It must have taken several people to get it cleared, but you can cover up a lot under "firmware optimisation", get it signed off, and other than Job Well Done it'll disappear in the massive sheaf of documentation pertaining to [engine project x], and reported up as part and parcel of the whole deal, never in detail.
If there's questions about How It's Done from Higher Up, all you need to do is waffle about "optimisation of existing variables" and have their eyes glaze over (any decent techie knows how to Bong¡ Management...) and ward off any scrutiny. "No sir, It's just a combination of optimised sub-variables which work for this particular setup. We've cleared it with Legal, but it's too specific to patent, yes, even in the US weirdly enough, which is a shame. But isn't it nice that we've got that edge up on the competition? We're pretty chuffed we found it as it saved us [x] man-hours of development, there's one of those thingies from Finance tacked to the report about it. I'm just glad we got the job done on time."
It's not bloody rocket science, and does not need to take more than a Manager without the relevant technical skills to call BS ( a situation that's become so common it's practically a law of nature nowadays..) to pull off. And once Signed Off it's Company IP, so Legal will do the Covering Up for you as par for the course.
The endless rounds of reviewing are nice, but even in Open Source Software, with thousands of (putatevely knowledgeable, sometimes even paranoid ) eyeballs scanning the code Things Get Missed and stuff slips through. Company review cycles are less efficient than that, so things will slip through, especially the stuff that's based on so basic a cheat, since no-one expects it to be there.
After all, the Governement Watchdogs would catch such blatant cheating right away...Right? ermmm... right?!!.... [/sarc]