Raymond DeGiorgio was just another obscure engineer at General Motors — until the company blamed him for starting the worst safety crisis in its history, the New York Times reported today. But even after being identified as the employee who approved a deadly defect in millions of cars, DeGiorgio has remained an enigmatic figure at the heart of GM’s recall scandal. GM dismissed him in June, and he went into seclusion, refusing interviews. When questioned by House investigators and company lawyers, he repeatedly said that he could not recall events or interactions with co-workers. GM has offered a litany of reasons for its inability to fix a defective part in its small cars for more than a decade, including a dysfunctional bureaucracy and a toxic culture that shunned accountability. But it has consistently focused blame on DeGiorgio, who approved the substandard switch in 2001 and secretly changed it five years later, leaving dangerous vehicles on the road and frustrating efforts within GM to investigate the problem.
