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I don’t think Deutsche Bank has ever received direct state aid, they’re quite proud of that fact. Though they have benefitted indirectly when institutions that owed Deutsche Bank money received state aid.

Lufthansa did receive state aid during the pandemic. This is currently under investigation as the EU’s approval was annulled by an EU court: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_...




To be clear: Germany also heavily subsidized a lot of other large companies, especially in the automotive industry during the pandemic but the politicians involved were mostly smart enough to hide this behind grants with tailor-made requirements that only incidentally happened to perfectly match those companies and few else.


At least VW and BMW have certainly received state aid in the past, mostly around opening new factories, but I can’t find anything where they got specific aid during Covid. Of course they were able to use support that’s open to all companies, e.g. Kurzarbeit, but that’s not considered state aid in the EU context.




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