Forbid enforcement of the anti-arms industry clause of ESG

Europe needs to build a defense industry but 95% of venture capital in Europe does not have the mandate in their LP investment agreements that they are allowed to invest in Arms.

It’s going to be really hard defending our borders with just baguettes so I propose to use the EU law supremacy to make these clauses unenforceable and drop the restriction on investing in weapons also from the “S” in the definition of ESG.

Currently the EIB, EIF and any EU fund is not allowed to invest in Arms, yet if you ask Ukrainians what they need they will almost uniformly beg for weapons.

Likewise, while dual-use defense industry sounds nice. In reality the value of defense companies accumulates to those who provide the product armies buy.

It’s particularly acute because most weapon systems are 30 years old and if we buy them from the US, not only do we pay 3x more than the US government. We also pay the US defense primes who have optimized sucking the US government dry of dollars.

The EU cares and is ideally positioned to build global defense leaders but unfortunately we are shooting ourselves quite literally in the foot at the moment by restricting almost all investment in the space.