Gulliver

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.

Banco Santander is a multinational financial services company that was founded in 1857. It was sued by 34 U.S. states over it’s automobile loans that involved high interest rates and prolonged repayment plans. Some 82 percent of these borrowers were considered sub-prime of whom roughly half defaulted. Despite these high default rates, the bank made a profit by borrowing at low interest rates and then re-selling the loans on the secondary market. In 2020, the bank paid the U.S. government $550 million to have the lawsuits dropped.