So, now that it has been established that the main profiteer in the COVID-19 ‘vaccine’ gold rush of the last two years is not Pfizer, but rather the still astonishingly little-known and previously tiny German firm BioNTech, it would appear that something needs to be said about who owns BioNTech.
As shown in my earlier article here, for 2021 and 2022 combined, BioNTech earned over $31 billion in Covid-19 “vaccine” profits on a whopping 77% profit margin as compared to Pfizer’s roughly $20 billion on an estimated 27.5% profit margin.
This revelation, however, has led many commentators on social media to suggest that none other than Bill Gates was somehow the main beneficiary of – and presumably éminence grise behind – BioNTech’s astronomic rise or even that BioNTech is a “Gates company.”
While it is true that the Gates Foundation – not Gates personally – invested in BioNTech in a deal that, as will be seen below, was likely brokered by the German government, and while that deal is indeed curious for its timing and some of its details, its purely economic significance has been wildly exaggerated.
As of December 30, 2020, the Gates Foundation’s initial holdings of 1,038,674 BioNTech shares represented a mere 0.43% of the company’s total stock, as the below Yahoo Finance chart makes clear.
This placed the Gates Foundation among the top institutional investors in BioNTech at the time. But that such relatively paltry holdings could qualify an organisation as a top institutional holder is itself indicative of a far lesser-known fact about BioNTech: namely, that it is a very closely held company, the great majority of whose shares are owned by just three people.
Consequently, only a very limited portion of BioNTech shares have ever been available for purchase by the Gates Foundation or anyone else.
The three principal shareholders are CEO Ugur Sahin and Germany’s Strüngmann twins, Andreas and Thomas, who provided much of the initial seed capital for the company’s founding in 2008.
According to BioNTech’s latest annual report to the SEC (p.192), the Strüngmanns own 105,613,143 shares representing 43.4% of BioNTech’s total stock: i.e., literally 100 times more than the Gates Foundation held! Sahin owns 42,262,039 shares representing 17.4% of the company’s stock. Together, Sahin and the Strüngmanns thus control nearly 61% of BioNTech stock.
The Strüngmanns are AT Impf in the below table. AT Impf is a fully-owned subsidiary of the twins’ ATHOS KG family office. Sahin is the sole shareholder of Medine.
Furthermore, as footnote 1 to the table specifies, “ATHOS KG via AT Impf GmbH has de facto control over BioNTech based on its substantial shareholding, which practically enabled it to exercise the majority of voting rights to pass resolutions at our Annual General Meeting.”
So, in short, BioNTech is not a “Gates company”, but rather literally a Strüngmann company, the Gates Foundation’s stake having always been extremely minor.
As discussed in a much-cited Substack post by Jordan Schachtel, the Gates Foundation has since sold off 890,000 shares in BioNTech, representing 86% of its previous holdings. Based on timing and the evolution of the BioNTech share price, Schachtel estimates that the foundation made $260 million on the sale or a whopping 1500% return on its initial investment.
It is this windfall that makes Gates appear like the main beneficiary of BioNTech’s sudden success in the often fact-deprived atmosphere of social media. But, needless to say, the Strüngmanns are the main beneficiaries of BioNTech’s success.
Indeed, as was widely reported in the German media at the time, the precipitous rise in BioNTech’s share price briefly catapulted the twins into the position of the richest people in Germany, with an estimated net worth of €52 billion or $62 billion, when the share price was at its highest in late 2021. Their BioNTech holdings alone were reported to be worth over €42 billion. (See, for example, the report in the German weekly Stern here.)
Of course, the BioNTech share price has since fallen back down somewhat closer to earth. But the twins do not appear to have been averse to getting some cold hard cash out of their investment while the share price was high either.
Thus, circa December 2020, when the Gates Foundation still held all of its initial holdings and 0.43% of BioNTech stock, the twins in fact held 114,410,338 shares or nearly 47.4% of BioNTech stock. (See page 201 of BioNTech’s 2020 annual report here.) This means that the twins have in the meanwhile divested themselves not of nearly 900,000 shares, like the Gates Foundation, but of nearly 9 million.
We know, moreover, from other SEC filings that they sold the great bulk of the shares (over 8 million) precisely in 2021, the year in which the BioNTech share price reached its peak. Depending then on the exact timing, they presumably made roughly ten times more than Gates – i.e., a haul of over $2 billion as opposed to the Gates Foundation’s $260 million – and not for the benefit of any non-profit organisation, but strictly for their own.
Furthermore, the Gates Foundation was not the only BioNTech partner to have apparently thought better about having too substantial a tie-up with BioNTech in the longer term. So too did none other than the Chinese pharmaceutical company Fosun Pharma.
This is also relevant to our topic, since Fosun – or allegedly even, via Fosun, the Chinese Communist Party! – is likewise often identified in social media posts and by certain commentators as somehow the “real” owner of BioNTech.
It is not and has never been anything of the sort. Rather, as part of its 2020 agreement with BioNTech to commercialise that latter’s COVID-19 vaccine on the Chinese market, it, like the Gates Foundation, acquired a minor equity stake in the German company.
That agreement, however, has largely remained a dead letter, since Chinese authorities have never even approved the vaccine for use on the mainland. This might have something to do with the fact that late last year the Chinese company sold off more than two-thirds of the 1,576,000 BioNTech shares it originally held. Per the calculation of the Chinese market specialists at Bamboo Works, this left Fosun with a mere 0.2% stake in BioNTech. So much for Chinese “control” of the company…
What, then, of the famous September 2019, pre-IPO equity deal in which the Gates Foundation acquired its holdings in BioNTech? How did Gates know to invest in a company that had never even gotten close to bringing a product to market, had only ever run losses – and was focused on developing cancer treatments, not vaccines against infectious diseases, to boot! Hardly anyone had ever even heard of BioNTech.
Well, the below image provides a clue.
It comes from the closing plenary session of the October 2018 World Health Summit: a German-government-sponsored event, which is held every year in Berlin. (See the World Health Summit ‘highlight’ video here.) The host institution is Germany’s premier university teaching hospital, the Charité, the chair of whose virology department is none other than Christian Drosten. It is Drosten, of course, who devised the famous PCR protocol that the WHO would adopt as the “gold standard” for detecting COVID-19 infections.
In addition to then German Chancellor Angela Merkel at centre stage, you will, of course, notice Bill Gates (whose Grand Challenges network co-hosted the session) directly to her right and WHO Director-General Tedros, a bit further away to her left.
But it is the man without a tie directly to Tedros’s left who is of particular interest to us here. For that is none other than BioNTech CEO Ugur Sahin.
It was the 2018 World Health Summit under the patronage of Chancellor Merkel that brought together Gates and Sahin. It is unlikely that Gates had ever heard of Sahin or his company before then either.
The German Government, on the other hand, knew Sahin and BioNTech very well. For, as touched upon in my November 2021 article here, the German government was the company’s state sponsor, both sponsoring its very founding and helping to keep it afloat with subsidies during the many years when BioNTech produced nothing.
Robert Kogon is a pen name for a widely-published financial journalist, translator and researcher working in Europe. Subscribe to his Substack and follow him on Twitter.
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It’s going to be a rerun of COVID.
Make up a global catastrophe. Force people to do all manner of insane things to avoid the “catastrophe”.
When catastrophe is averted, claim it was all the action taken that saved us.
Everybody will have been so comoletely indoctrinated and so invested in the supposed solutions that it will be impossible to convince them they’ve been duped.
That btw is pretty much the story of most government action.
This is a linear forecast of events. Reality is far more chaotic though.
I think it was Basil Fawlty who said “a lie repeated often enough becomes the truth”.
May have been someone else.
Judging by the smug visage of the accompanying photo, she looks like she needed more hugs as a child.
Usually attributed to Goebbels, and cited as such over half a million times on the Internet. But in fact there’s no evidence he ever said it, which kind of proves the point.
Goebbels, in fact, accused the English of stupidity in “telling a big lie and sticking to it.” “Vaccines are safe and effective.” “Russia has run out of ammunition.” “Britain is getting hotter year by year.” “Diversity is a traditional British value.” It seems he was right, doesn’t it?
I’d more or less heard the same, though it is April 1st!
And more bugs. Yum.
The ‘big lie’ quote is usually attributed to Joseph Goebbels!
Co2? Causes weather, seasons and climate?
There is 0 correlation between Co2 and climate. It is plant food. Necessary to make oxygen. I would like more of it please.
After sitting through 5 months of a shitty UK winter I would like some warmtarding too please.
Doesn’t Gaia emit 95% of the 0.04% Co2 trace chemical? Isn’t THE SCIENCE ™ suggesting we kill her to save her?
I don’t believe in the man-made catastrophic climate change narrative, but I think we should acknowledge that man does have some impact on the climate, mainly through the greenhouse effect. My understanding is that any contribution man has made through the greenhouse effect is pretty much at saturation point i.e. increases in atmospheric CO2 above the current level of around 410 parts per million will have negligible impact (see the attached diagram, which indicates a rise in CO2 from 400 ppm to 800 ppm increases temp by 0.4C and 400 to 1600 ppm results in 1C).
I also think it is disingenuous of us to talk of man’s share of CO2 emissions, since Gaia both emits (land, volcanoes, oceans) and absorbs (vegetation, oceans) CO2. So, while man’s share of emissions may be less than 5%, it will be a much higher % of net emissions (see attached diagram).
What bullshit.
98% of Co2 is reused.
Are you telling me that man’s Co2 ‘forces’ only a positive feedback loop and Gaia’s does not.
Greenhouse is horseshit.
There is no glass ceiling.
No need to be discourteous since MichaelM didn’t actually say that.
I think the big hitters on our side of the argument (ie those not buying the climate catastrophe narrative), such as Richard Lindzen and William Happer, do acknowledge the greenhouse effect and that the burning of fossil fuels has had a significant impact on the increase in atmospheric CO2 from 280 ppm to 410 ppm over the last 150-200 years.
I do agree with you that there is no glass ceiling round the Earth.
If you want to generate a halting problem in someone claiming that a large percentage of species have gone extinct due to climate change, ask them to name one.
The BBC are CLIMATE ACTIVISTS. They claim to be reporting on science. But in science you question everything, otherwise it is isn’t science you are dealing in. So by questioning NOTHING all the BBC reveal is that they are not reporting on science at all, they are reporting on “Official Science”. You can switch on TV News almost every day and hear of extreme weather, more floods, more droughts, more storms etc etc and most people busy with work and family life will just accept that as truth because they assume they are listening to investigative journalism. But in the real world there is no increase in the frequency or intensity of any type of weather event. ———— How can it be that our National Broadcaster is reporting the opposite of what is true and getting away with it? SKY NEWS with their “Climate Show” do something similar but we are not all forced to pay for SKY. ————-The mainstream media talk of the “Climate Emergency” and the “Climate Crisis”, but this is not the language of science, it is the language of politics. For many of the unsuspecting public it is difficult to grasp why misinformation on this industrial scale would be taking place. They think the issue is all about science, but don’t realise the issue is highly politicised and that there is a political agenda behind it all. That political agenda is the United Nations Sustainable Development, and if there is no increase in the frequency or intensity of any type of weather event then that whole political agenda collapses. So the idea that extreme weather is getting worse MUST be kept in the public’s eye. They must at all times be under the impression that floods and storms will kill millions and sea level rise will drown coastal cities. This is the biggest pseudo scientific fraud ever perpetrated and I am thoroughly embarrassed that the British Broadcasting Company is part of it.
We’re all doomed
But this time! It’s real, honest!
We can trace the decision to the infamous Jan-2006 seminar organised by Harrabin himself – the actual Harrabin, not an ancestor – entitled ‘Climate Change: The Challenge to Broadcasting.’
For several years the BBC stonewalled all enquiry on who the seminar’s attendees had been, though it was known that the Heads TV and Radio News and many senior executives were there. An internet archive search revealed in 2009 that only 3 scientists, none of them ‘climate’, were there, the rest of the attendees being emissaries of WWF, Greenpeace, Friends of the earth, etc.
The only journalist, Richard D North, described the BBC people present as ignorant, having done no background reading or research, and bent on whipping up the most hysterically alarmist picture possible.
The keynote speaker was the Australian ecologist Lord May. He was president of the Royal Society 2000-05 and had transformed it into a relentless evangeliser for global warming. The gist of his speech was that dissenters were so few and marginal they could be safely classed with flat-earthers and perpetual-motionists, and the BBC Charter obligation of impartiality could therefore be set aside.
No criterion has ever been set or even debated for restoring it, despite the fact that many eminent atmospheric physicists – profs Lindzen, Christy, Spencer – have denied that there is any climate crisis.
Wasn’t Lord May played by Christopher Lee in The Wicker Man? Hotspots in the Summer Isles.
Might I suggest some family connection to Dame June?
Don’t the Big Black Cock corporation realise how out of touch they are with the licence payers? Or, maybe they aren’t?
” I’d gladly pay twice the price for my television licence ”
happily stupid from Milton Keynes.
“Brainwashing, corrupt, biased” are some of the more moderate adjectives applied to the BBC by readers of Andrew Montford’s excellent 57 page pamphlet ‘The Propaganda Bureau.’
It should be compulsory reading for all, with lefties compelled to learn it by rote.
I’ve just been offered 450 quid and an apology by the BBC for harassment over the TV licence and subsequently lying to me.
It was beautiful, they thought they were being cute, but every email or letter they sent contained lies.
For example, they said I had no visits from am enforcement officer in 2020….I said I never said 2020. They then realised I’d had 3 visits but said it was “the other department’s fault” for withholding the information…and so on.
They could not put pen to paper or finger to keyboard without lying and it was the carelessness of their lies which was as galling as the harassment. Could have been written by Kirtsy Wark.
Result! But I suspect very few get a modest jackpot but are continually harassed in a Kafka-esque manner.
Maybe 1 in 800? Where have I heard that stat before?
What shocks me is the number of people that genuinely believe all this catastrophising nonsense. Extreme gullibility and an inability to question the validity of outlandish claims make the general population vulnerable to manipulation. When will they turn bbc off?
The people outside of Islington don’t even watch the British Bias Corporation, never mind paying the laughable licence fee. The access to objectivity and the truth from the Internet broadcasting news network has killed it.
Is it true or did you hear it on the BBC?
The BBC is now the Globalist and Government slut, used to control the official narrative with Ofcom, and the Trusted News Initiative (what a joke). Taxpayers are not just funding via the licenses but also through Government spending on advertising. Billy Boy has kindly given them over £12million. Other channels like Sky are similar.
The once proud bastion of truth and integrity across the globe is one of our worst enemies, working with Government and corporations to cause tremendous harm to our society.
Humanity-caused climate change advocates remind me of this –
In the past, in some civilizations, sacrifices were offered so that the sun would rise the next day.
Sacrifices were offered.
Sure enough the sun rose the next day.
Therefore proof that the sacrifices worked to cause the sun to rise.
The media increases readership and viewership by giving constant attention to a ‘crisis’.
It’s in their interest to hype every conspiracy theory about catastrophe and crisis.
Gets people attention and they want to read or view the news stories.
Why has this paper now been retracted?