Banking institutions have been implicated in the use of cluster munitions in Misrata. Deutsche Bank granted Spanish company Instalaza, the cluster bomb manufacturer, a loan of about €3.1 million according to information from non-governmental organisation Urgewald, as reported in the weekly Die Zeit on Wednesday.
More than 100 countries signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions at the end of 2008 – it became binding international law for those who signed at the start of August 2010. The convention bans not only the use but also the support of manufacture of cluster munitions.
A spokesman for Deutsche Bank told Die Zeit he could not comment on specific customer relationships, but denied the bank financed the sale of the controversial munitions.
“Deutsche Bank does no business directly connected to certain types of weapons like personnel landmines, cluster bombs or ABC weapons,” he said.
The paper said the Deutsche Bank loan was made in 2007 and reported that other German companies have continued to invest in cluster bomb manufacturers since then. More than a dozen insurers offer Germans taking part in the Riester-Funds pension scheme the option of putting their money in funds which have invested in cluster bomb makers.
These include Deutscher Ring, Basler, Condor, Stuttgarter, Volkswohlbund and WWK. The paper noted that because the Riester-Funds contracts are co-funded by the German government, it should be assumed that public money is also finding its way into the coffers of cluster bomb manufacturers.
The question of who actually fired the cluster munitions into Misrata remains open, with none of Qatar, Libya and the USA having signed up to the Convention.
Human rights investigations 