Germany's justice minister on Thursday defended her plans to salvage parts of a law governing Volkswagen AG that was ruled illegal by a European court, telling company employees that the European Commission would be «ill-advised» to take new legal action, AP reported. The Commission has said Germany should scrap plans to keep a rule that gives the automaker's second-largest shareholder _ its home state of Lower Saxony _ the ability to block major decisions. It has said it may go to court again. However, the Cabinet on Tuesday approved a draft law that includes that provision. Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries told an assembly of some 10,000 workers at VW's Wolfsburg headquarters that she is confident the plan complies with last year's ruling from the European Court of Justice. «The Commission would be ill-advised to go down the judicial path again _ that would be very thin ice,» she said, adding that Germany would not be «put off by individual opinions from Brussels.» Zypries said she would inform competition authorities in Brussels that the planned legislation is «a good, correct and important law for the form of economies that we want to have in Europe.» The European Court of Justice last year struck down the original, nearly 50-year-old «VW law,» whose main effect was to protect Europe's largest automaker by sales from a hostile takeover. Germany stressed that it would comply with the ruling, in particular scrapping a provision that capped shareholders' voting rights at 20 percent, whatever the size of their holding.
