Qatar Just Handed Netanyahu His Backside On A Plate!

Right, so Volkswagen had a problem.Its Osnabrück plant was running out of road, car production was winding down, thousands of jobs were hanging in the balance, and somebody somewhere clearly thought: well, if we can’t sell enough cars, perhaps we can start building bits for Israel’s missile systems instead.Enter Rafael.Israeli government-owned. Iron Dome manufacturer. Very keen on a German factory, German machinery and a ready-made workforce.Cars out. Launchers, transporters and power equipment in.A wonderfully neat little arrangement, provided you don’t look at it for more than six seconds.Germany gets another chunk of industry pushed towards weapons for an Israeli state owned arms manufacturer. Volkswagen gets to call it a rescue plan. Rafael gets a foothold inside one of Europe’s biggest manufacturing names.But then Qatar enters the story. Gulf state, Iran facing, not exactly on the best of terms with Israel right now all things considered.You see Qatar Holding, the state-backed investment arm, is one of Volkswagen’s largest shareholder blocs. It owns roughly 10.4% of the company’s shares, but because of Volkswagen’s voting structure, that translates into about 17% of the shareholder voting rights.Seventeen percent of the votes inside Volkswagen.So Qatar has real corporate weight. Boardroom weight. Enough influence, according to the reporting, to obstruct the Rafael arrangement and later have its intervention described as a veto.And we should also remember that Qatar, unusually among the Gulf states seemingly edging ever closer to Israel, has never formally normalised relations with it.So it appears to have looked at Volkswagen’s proposed partnership with an Israeli state-owned arms company and said: absolutely not.Actual shareholder power.