HEADQUARTERS
Stuttgart, Germany
publicly traded
NO
LARGEST SHAREHOLDERS
Landesbank is an institution under public law.
LBBW is owned by the Federal State of Baden-Württemberg, the Savings Bank Association of Baden-Württemberg and the City of Stuttgart.
operations
Germany
total assets
£310 billion (EUR 356 billion)
financing overview
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Palestine occupation
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£2,540,000,000
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LBBW holds over £138 million in shares, and provides £2.5 billion in loans and underwriting to companies complicit in the occupation of Palestine.
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Company highlights and involvement
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company involved
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funding
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climate crisis
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PALESTINE OCCUPATION
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MAN GROUP
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£773m
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AXEL SPRINGER
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£765m
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TUI GROUP
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£601m
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SIEMENS
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£400m
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Companies bankrolling the occupation of palestine
Funded: £765m
palestine occupation
Axel Springer SE is a European multinational mass media company, based in Berlin, Germany. The company offers printing and publishing of advertisements, digital classifieds portfolio, marketing models and related services. Axel Springer’s operations are segmented into News Media, Classifieds Media, and Marketing Media. The company is organised as a publishing house and is one of the largest mass media publishers in the EU with numerous multimedia news brands, such as Bild, Die Welt, Fakt, and the US political news site Politico.
Springer’s Israeli classified ads website Yad2 — the largest Craigslist-like classifieds site in the country — publishes real estate listings across Israel, including rental apartments and sales in Israeli settlements that are considered illegal under international law. Since its founding in 2005, Yad2 has become Israel’s top online platform for classified ads.
A complaint was filled earlier by the Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Centre on behalf of the Palestinians, the complaint says that Yad2’s facilitation of settlement activity fuels Israeli land grabbing and therefore violates Germany’s Supply Chain Due Diligence Act. Passed last year, the law requires German companies to identify and mitigate human rights risks within their global supply chains, including in subsidiaries which they control.
Springer enshrines support for Israel in its mission statement, formal internal guidance that the company calls its “essentials.” All of Springer’s subsidiaries and employees are bound to uphold this stance. In October 2023, the firm fired a Lebanese employee who questioned the pro-Israel policy.
Funded: £400m
palestine occupation
CLIMATE CRISIS
Siemens is a publicly traded German multinational technology company. It sells products to the manufacturing, infrastructure and transport sectors. It has sold these products to the Israeli state-owned companies and its products have been used in occupied territories.
Case study: Siemens train cars used in the A1 route
- Israel
In 2018, Siemens won a tender from the Israeli state-owned railway company, Israel Railways, for the supply of 330 electric cars in the amount of approximately NIS 4 billion, as part of the Israel Railways electrification project, which includes the Tel Aviv Jerusalem Fast Train (A1).
The tender included the provision of wagons in the amount of NIS 3.2 billion, the establishment of the maintenance facility for the wagons in the amount of NIS 230 million and maintenance services in the amount of approximately NIS 400 million. The tender included the purchase of 60 sets of electric cars, which make up about 330 cars, which contain about 33,000 seats. In addition, Siemens will build a maintenance facility for the electric cars for the company and provide maintenance services.
In December 2021, the Siemens train cars came into use in the A1 train route. The A1 train route crosses the Green Line into the occupied West Bank in two areas, using occupied Palestinian land, some of it privately owned, for an Israeli transportation project aimed exclusively for Israelis. In December 2021, the Siemens train cars came into use in the A1 train route.
For more on the A1 train see Who Profits report: Crossing the Line: The Tel Aviv Jerusalem Fast Train (A1).
Funded: £601m
palestine occupation
The German TUI Group is one of the world’s largest tourism companies, operating 1,600 travel agencies and its own airlines, hotels, and cruise liners. As documented by GLAN and SOMO, several of its subsidiaries offer guided tours that are solely branded as visiting Israel but include sites in illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and the occupied Syrian Golan. While the tours can currently not be booked, TUI’s Dutch subsidiary TUI Nederland N.V. advertises on its website several group tours that visit the settlement Qumran National Park. GLAN and SOMO described how the national park and adjacent parking lot for tour buses were formerly used by indigenous Palestinian Bedouin communities. These communities have increasingly been forcibly displaced from their ancestral land and are subject to restrictions on access to land, water, electricity and other infrastructure and basic services. The tours are labelled as visiting “Israel and Jordan” and “Highlights of Israel”. Another example was a tour offered by TUI Belgium, “Back to the beginning – Israel”, that could still be booked in June 2023. It included visits to Bethlehem in the OPT, the occupied Golan Heights, and sights in occupied East Jerusalem.
TUI Group’s activities are concerning as they are supporting the existence of illegal settlements and contribute to their normalisation.
Funded: £773m
palestine occupation
MAN Group is a German multinational company and a leading supplier of commercial vehicles and transport solutions in Europe. As reported by Who Profits, the company supplies the chassis for the car that carries the “Skunk”. This non-lethal crowd control weapon made by Odortec has been widely used by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem, and within the Green Line against Palestinians in demonstrations and as a punitive measure. It spreads a stench that attaches to bodies and objects for considerable periods.
MAN Group also supplies chassis for buses to Egged Group, an Israeli bus company that operates bus lines to settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Caterpillar is a long-standing supplier of the Israeli military and provides it with a variety of heavy engineering machinery, including different wheel loaders, armored excavators, mini loaders and several models from the D9 armored bulldozer series (D9R, D9N, D9L and D9T).
Caterpillar machinery has been widely used for house demolition and settlement construction in the occupied Palestinian territory, as well as for the construction of the Separation Wall in the occupied West Bank and the barrier surrounding besieged Gaza.
Fitted D9 Caterpillar bulldozers are extensively used by the Israeli military to accompany military forces during invasions and military arrests in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.
D9 Caterpillar bulldozers have demolished thousands of homes in Gaza since the latest conflict started in 2023. They have caused massive damage and made large parts of Gaza uninhabitable.