Jan 17, 2022
British Gas pension cash used to buy Israeli spyware group NSO
Pension cash for British Gas workers was used to buy Israeli cyberweapon developer NSO Group, whose spyware has been found on the phones of human rights activists and journalists. The retirement investment fund of Centrica, the parent company of British Gas, was among the biggest contributors to the €1bn fund that bought a stake in NSO in 2019, three people with knowledge of the matter said. Centrica's investment fund allocated pension cash to a private equity fund raised by Novalpina Capital, a firm set up in 2017 by three former TPG Capital executives, Stephen Peel, Stefan Kowski and Bastian Lueken. In October Amnesty International wrote to Oregon's public employee retirement system, Alaska's $81bn permanent fund and two English local government pension funds, East Riding Pension Fund and the South Yorkshire Pensions Authority, over their commitments to the Novalpina fund. In addition to NSO, the Novalpina fund owns the Estonian gambling company Olympic Entertainment Group and the French pharmaceutical business Laboratoire XO. NSO's cyberweapon is designed by veterans of the Israeli military to mirror the contents of a phone, including encrypted messages, on a remote terminal and record video and audio surreptitiously.
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