Korean owners of Volkswagen’s gasoline vehicles will be seeking criminal charges against the German carmaker for manipulating its software to pass emissions tests, said a legal representative here on Monday.

“We are gathering customers to file class-action suits as well as criminal charges against the automaker. (For criminal charges), the system manipulation may cause an engine breakdown, which may lead to physical damages to users,” Ha Jong-sun, a lawyer at Barun that represents those customers, told The Korea Herald.

This comes after the prosecution’s investigation report revealed earlier this month. The carmaker’s head office in Wolfsburg had ordered Audi Volkswagen Korea to manipulate the engine control units of its Golf 1.4TSI after the gasoline sedan failed to pass the government’s emission tests in May 2014, according to the prosecution.

Investigators said they secured emails exchanged between the two VW offices in Germany and Korea as well as a testimony from a Korean employee in charge of the authentication process.

More than 1,500 units of the automaker’s gasoline model Golf 1.4TSI were sold in the local market.

Experts agreed that the illegal manipulation of software, which violates the Clean Air Conservation Act, is highly likely to damage the durability of cars.

“When a car with inappropriate software hits the roads, it may cause serious durability problems especially on emission reduction devices,” said Choi Young-seok, the head of the Convergence Research Institute for Forensic Safety’s vehicle research division.

The manipulation charge is the latest in a series of allegations against the German automaker, which is suspected of various legal breaches in Korea. Earlier this month, the prosecutor confiscated 956 vehicles including the Audi A1, Audi A3 and Volkswagen Golf, and suspected that 606 cars of these cars either failed to obtain certification from the Ministry of Environment or exceeded the limit for harmful gas emissions.

In the same month, the Seoul prosecutors’ office also found that the automaker fabricated 48 test results on fuel economy -- among 26 car models including the Golf 2.0TDI -- submitted to the Korea Energy Agency from 2012 to 2014. All the charges are subject to violations of the Clean Air Conservation Act.

By Shin Ji-hye (shinjh@heraldcorp.com)