Gulliver

Air France-KLM is a Franco-Dutch airline. Air France was founded in 1933 and KLM in 1919. The two airlines merged in 2004. Both have had major accidents: A KLM crash in Tenerife, Spain, in 1977 recorded the highest number of casualties in history when it crashed into a Pan Am plane on take-off killing 583. An Air France flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris crashed in the Atlantic Ocean killing 228 people on board in June 2009.

Airbus is a major airline and military aircraft manufacturer that was created in 1970 to compete with Boeing with the help of generous subsidies from the British, French, German, and Spanish governments. The company has been investigated over corruption in Austria, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, the Philippines, Malaysia, Mexico, Nepal, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Taiwan, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Vietnam. In 2020 the company paid out $4 billion to prosecutors in France, the United States and the United Kingdom to drop investigations and lawsuits into alleged bribery payments.

Amazon is a retail behemoth whose real business is data – Big Data. Founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994, the company relentlessly gathers data every time an individual uses its website or its voice assistant in order to be able to sell more stuff. It is infamous for its use of low paid warehouse workers and delivery drivers who are tasked with delivering a wide variety of products to online shoppers. It also owns one of the world’s largest clusters of ‘cloud’ computer networks (Amazon Web Services) that millions of individuals, businesses and government agencies use to host their data, including the Central Intelligence Agency.

Asklepios Kliniken is a major hospital operator in Germany. Founded by billionaire Bernard Broermann in 1984 to capitalize on the privatization of government healthcare facilities, Akslepios recently expanded into the luxury hotel sector with the purchase of three Kempinski hotels. It has been the subject of multiple investigations for failing to provide services that it promised when it bought up hospitals at below market value. For example, at the end of 2019, Asklepios closed a children’s ward in the small town of Parchim in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, obliging residents to travel 50 kilometers to get to the nearest medical facility. Goslar district in Lower Saxony sued Asklepios Kliniken for €20 million in 2019 for failing to guarantee inpatient and emergency care at the Clausthal-Zellerfeld hospital.