3 Dear customers, suppliers and business partners Dear colleagues My contribution to our 2020 Sustainability Report bore the title: “The pandemic will not go away by itself – and nor will social injustice and environmental destruction.” Looking back on 2020, this is what I said: “All of a sudden, in spring 2020, everyone’s focus was solely and exclusively on the social and economic consequences of the pandemic. Greta Thunberg, the Fridays For Future campaign, climate activists and all the frequent demonstrations, events and media reports about climate change were swept away by the coronavirus pandemic. All the efforts that were being made in relation to the environment and sustainability and were previously so important suddenly became irrelevant, all over the world. And the same thing happened at Girsberger.” However, after this initial shock-induced paralysis, the world learned to live with the pandemic and at the same time came to realise that, compared with Covid, global warming is a far greater threat to humanity. In this context, I underlined our perspective in the 2020 Sustainability Report by saying: “At Girsberger, we see ourselves as being under an ongoing obligation to ensure that the continuing threat to the environment and the need to do business sustainably are permanently rooted in our consciousness.” Less than a year after the publication of our 2020 Sustainability Report, during the night of 24 February 2022, we sent out the following information to all employees of the Girsberger Group: “Dear colleagues Our Group’s position on Vladimir Putin’s military attack on Ukraine is expressed on our website as follows: ‘We are stunned and deeply shocked by the invasion of Ukraine, which Vladimir Putin has decided upon with a complete disregard for humanity. Our sympathies and sense of solidarity lie with the Ukrainian people.’ With the colours of the Ukrainian flag as the background, this text is currently on the homepage of our website.” Since then, another year and more has passed during which deaths in war, armed conflicts and terror attacks around the world have continued to increase. Millions of adults and children fall victim to inhumane dictatorships, military regimes and terror organisations. There is currently no sign of an end to, or even a defusing of, the humanitarian catastrophes – neither in North Korea and Myanmar, nor in Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, the Republic of Congo, and numerous other countries in Africa and the Near and Middle East. Even within Europe, Russia is intensifying the terror of its war in Ukraine and, the longer Putin goes on driving his country ever further into the abyss, the greater the risk of an even more catastrophic escalation of this war. But Putin is still not sufficiently isolated from the global community. In some cases the UN sanctions are being circumvented, and, along with the nuclear powers of China, India and Pakistan, there are other important countries such as Iran and South Africa which have not come out in opposition to Russia’s war. Even in Europe itself, one democratic country is still maintaining its political and economic links with Russia: the Republic of Serbia, where one of our production sites is located.
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