BERLIN (Reuters) - Martin Winterkorn will stay on as chief executive of Volkswagen , the company said on Friday, in an unprecedented defeat for its powerful chairman.
The supervisory board's steering committee will propose to extend Winterkorn's contract at the board meeting in February 2016, VW said.
Ferdinand Piech, the current patriarch of Volkswagen's founding family, had provoked a showdown with Winterkorn by planting a comment in weekly magazine Der Spiegel that he had "distanced himself" from his CEO.
(Reporting by Andreas Cremer; Editing by Kirsti Knolle)