/>iVinFast whistleblower Hazar Denli has filed whistleblower complaints with U.S. whistleblower award programs at the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). As reported by BBC, Denli has raised concerns about safety issues in the engineering of VinFast electric cars.
“We are proud to be representing Mr. Denli, who has demonstrated immense bravery in coming forward with information about critical safety issues,” says Kohn, Kohn & Colapinto (KKC) founding partner Michael Kohn, who is representing Denli in his complaints with U.S. regulators. “We hope that authorities will respond accordingly to such a serious and pressing matter.”
“Mr. Denli has found egregious safety issues in VinFast cars that are being sold in the United States,” adds KKC’s Benjamin Calitri, who is representing Denli alongside Kohn. “This case shows the transnational power of U.S. whistleblower laws, as a foreign whistleblower can provide information on an international company that is harming Americans.”
Denli was a mechanical engineer and module leader at Tata Technologies Ltd, which is owned by Tata Group, between September 2022 and May 2023. During this time, Denli was “seconded,” along with 300-500 other engineers from Tata Technologies, to work as a contractor at VinFast to engineer their electric cars.
During their experience at VinFast, Denli found significant engineering and safety issues with VinFast cars. He raised these issues he found internally, along with solutions to these issues, but was told that the fixes would not be made in order to not delay production.
In January 2024, Denli began work at Jaguar Land Rover, which is also owned by Tata Group. After seeing examples of incidents with VinFast cars, including the death of a family of four in California who died in a VinFast VF 8, Denli made an anonymous post on Reddit on May 30, 2024 that explained the engineering issues he found with VinFast cars. VinFast and Tata Group later uncovered that Denli was responsible for this post, and he was fired in July 2024.
Denli went public with this information on December 18, 2024 in a series of articles published by BBC News. These articles resulted almost immediately in VinFast cars being retracted from use as taxis in Vietnam. Prior to the publication of these articles, Denli filed whistleblower reports with the SEC Whistleblower Program and the NHTSA Whistleblower Program.
The SEC Whistleblower Program offers monetary awards and protections to whistleblowers who disclose securities violations while the NHTSA Whistleblower Program offers awards and protections to those reporting auto safety issues. The NHTSA program was established in 2015 but just adopted final rules in December 2024.
Denli, while located in the United Kingdom, is utilizing U.S. whistleblower award laws as they have been proven to be more effective and offer monetary awards to whistleblowers. The effectiveness of U.S. award laws, and their pull for U.K. whistleblowers, was recently documented in a landmark report by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).
