They're taking advantage of the same misfeature of our justice system that is being discussed here, notably that it's all based on individual personal responsibility and scales very poorly to lawbreaking at scale or cases where the negative outcome had many people responsible for it.
Corporate execs use this frequently to legitimize atrocious conduct. Have a pesky law (like the Freedom of Information Act requests that were discussed here yesterday) that you want to ensure is not complied with? Create a team whose job is compliance, but underfund them by a factor of 100, so that there is no possible way they can catch and address all of their legal obligations. The exec created a relevant team and delegated responsibility, so they're in the clear. The individual workers are falling down on the job and not responding to requests fast enough, but they're also falling down on the job and doing the best they can, so at worst they should get a bad performance review and no raise, they can't be held criminally liable. The people trying to get the law enforced are just outta luck, because it's another unfunded mandate and they don't hold the budget strings.
Or consider the case of cheating on emissions standards. No executive will tell their engineers "You should cheat on these" - that would be a crime, right? But instead, they might take the 20 or so employees that have the biggest disrespect for rules. And then they give each of them a small team and a budget, and have the teams compete to create the best engine on a variety of metrics that are important to customers, but notably not the emissions standards, because it goes without saying that everyone is going to follow the law, right? Then inevitably one of those teams will win and there's a good chance that it's one that cheated on emissions, but of course the exec had no knowledge of that and the team lead in question has been fired.