How the British Gas Group joined the Israeli Nso spyware group
The pension investment fund of Centrica, the parent company of British Gas, was among the largest contributors to the € 1 billion fund which bought a stake in Nso
British Gas workers' pension money was used to buy Israeli cyber-weapons developer Nso Group, whose spyware was found on the phones of human rights activists and journalists. The Financial Times writes.
The pension investment fund of Centrica, the parent company of British Gas, was among the largest contributors to the € 1 billion fund that bought a stake in NSO in 2019, three people familiar with the matter said.
Last year, the US Department of Commerce blacklisted NSO stating that there was evidence that the company had provided spyware to foreign governments that "used these tools to maliciously target government officials, journalists, businessmen. , activists, academics and embassy workers ".
His Pegasus software was used to spy on at least three people close to the murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, according to Amnesty International and Citizen Lab. Nso said Khashoggi was never a Pegasus target by any of his clients and his own. technology was in no way associated with his family members or his murder.
Nso also faces legal actions brought by Meta (formerly Facebook) owner of WhatsApp. Meta claims it exploited a vulnerability in the messaging service to spread its spyware, while Apple wants to block it and prevent its use in its products.
"The use of IT tools to monitor dissidents, activists and journalists is a serious abuse of any technology and goes against the intended use of such critical tools," Nso said. "Nso has shown in the past that it has zero tolerance for these types of misuse, terminating multiple contracts."
Centrica's investment fund has allocated pension cash to a private equity fund raised by Novalpina Capital, a company created in 2017 by three former TPG Capital executives, Stephen Peel, Stefan Kowski and Bastian Lueken. Novalpina owns a 70 percent stake in Nso, according to the software company.
The Centrica Combined Common Investment Fund has a representative on a committee of Novalpina's major investors. Each of these investors contributes at least tens of millions of euros, two people familiar with the matter said.
Centrica declined to comment.
The family office of Belgian billionaire Albert Frère, who died in 2018, is another of Novalpina's biggest investors. The Compagnie Nationale à Portefeuille has committed approximately 50 million euros to the fund.
CNP "does not participate in the investment and / or commercial decisions of the fund," including the decision to buy NSO, its legal officer Gauthier Parisis told the Financial Times . He also added that he was "deeply concerned and disturbed by the internal developments in Novalpina".
Other investors in the Novalpina fund have previously disclosed their positions and faced political pressure.
In October, Amnesty International wrote to the Oregon Government Employee Retirement System, Alaska's $ 81 billion Permanent Fund and two British local government pension funds, the East Riding Pension Fund and South Yorkshire Pensions Authority, regarding their commitments in the Novalpina fund. He told investors they were "directly linked" to the "abuse of human rights".
A spokesperson for Oregon replied that she did not participate in Novalpina's choice of target companies or their administration, was "deeply troubled by reports of developments regarding the NSO Group" and was considering "various legal options". Alaska, ERPF and SYPA did not comment.
When it was raising its fund in 2017, Novalpina communicated to aspiring investors that it would "target opportunities across Western Europe" and aim to buy companies valued at 200 to 500 million euros, according to documents published by the Council for investments of Oregon at the time. Its investment in Nso, which has a Luxembourg-based parent company based in Herzliya, Israel, has valued the company at around $ 1 billion.
Last year Novalpina was deprived of control of its own fund after a dispute between its co-founders. Investors have appointed consultancy firm Berkeley Research Group to manage the fund, with a mandate to close it and return their money.
BRG is in the process of determining how much money investors could recover from the fund, including from the Nso deal. "I am clearly concerned if there is any value in Nso," a person close to an investor told the FT in November.
In addition to Nso, the Novalpina fund owns the Estonian gambling company Olympic Entertainment Group and the French pharmaceutical company Laboratoire XO.
Nso's cyber weapon designed by Israeli army veterans to transmit the contents of a phone, including encrypted messages, to a remote terminal and surreptitiously record video and audio. It is being sold to allies of the Israeli government, and the company says it is only licensed to be used to prevent serious crime and terrorism.
However, it has been tracked on the phones of hundreds of journalists, dissidents and government opponents in dozens of countries. Human rights advocates are demanding that the company be kept in check and that the industry be more fully regulated.
Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the billionaire ruler of Dubai, allowed his "servants or agents" to use Nso's Pegasus spyware to hit the phone of his wife, Princess Haya, as a London judge discovered last year.
(Extract from the foreign press review by eprcomunicazione )
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/come-il-gruppo-british-gas-e-entrato-nel-gruppo-israeliano-di-spyware-nso/ on Sat, 22 Jan 2022 07:29:43 +0000.