Activists protest German energy company's trade with Iran at its board of directors meeting

By BENJAMIN WEINTHAL, JERUSALEM POST CORRESPONDENT, MUNICH
German and Iranian human rights activists bought shares in The Linde Group, the gases and engineering giant, and posed tough questions to the Linde board of directors on Friday at the annual stockholder meeting about the company's controversial trade relationship with Iran.
While European oil corporations such as the French company Total are backing away from production in Iran because of Teheran's political instability, Linde is developing a project with the National Iran Oil company to liquefy natural gas and earned a total revenue of 91 million euros from Iran in 2008. Speaking at the Munich International Congress Center before 2,000 stockholders and the Linde board of directors, Dr. Kazem Moussavi, an Iranian who fled the Islamic Republic due to political repression and lives in Germany, asked the Linde top management whether "you can as a board of directors... conduct business with a regime that destroys the human rights of its population and denies the Holocaust and has repeatedly threatened to wipe Israel off the map?"
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