Michael Millikin,a top lawyer at General Motors will be one of the few remaining in his sector after the automaker fired 15 other top employees on Thursday, according to Reuters.
The firing is over an ignition-switch defect which has been linked to at least 13 deaths, Reuters reported.
Millikin, GM's general counsel since 2009 and a key counselor to Chief Executive Mary Barra, was still on the job, Barra said in response to a reporter's question at an event in Warren, Michigan, according to Reuters.
A report prepared by outside counsel and released on Thursday found that Millikin was among those who were unaware of problems with the switch until GM decided to issue a recall in January, Barra said in the report, Reuters reported.
In March, GM said Millikin would co-lead an internal inquiry into the defect with Anton Valukas, the chairman of Jenner & Block, a large, Chicago-based law firm, according to Reuters. Millikin's legal department was among the GM offices facing questions, and when the report came out on Thursday morning, Valukas was listed as the sole author.
Barra said there had been a pattern of "incompetence and neglect," and that 15 employees who acted inappropriately had been fired, Reuters reported. She did not name individuals but said they worked in four departments, including legal.
The legal department came under scrutiny after GM told U.S. safety regulators this year that its lawyers had "opened a file" in 2005 on a 16-year-old who died in Maryland in the crash of her Chevrolet Cobalt, Reuters reported.
Investigators found that the ignition switch in her car had been turned off before the crash and that the air bag failed to deploy, similar to the recall issues which said about 2.6 million cars were in danger, according to Reuters.
Millikin spent almost his entire career at GM, according to his company biography, Reuters reported. He began in 1977 after serving as a federal prosecutor in Detroit, and steadily advanced. He was based in Zurich from 1997 to 2000.
