Events - 2021

The GIUK Board and Advisory Council had a very successful Online Meeting with the German Ambassador to the UK, HE Andreas Michaelis, on Wednesday, 17 March and discussed the challenges facing German business with COVID19 and Post-Brexit with him. We also talked about relations between the UK and Germany, very important to the Ambassador, and we will continue to support him in his endeavour. The UK has left the EU but not Europe and relations between the two major countries, the UK and Germany, are just as vital now and for the future as before.

We had a very rewarding online meeting with Lord Grimstone of Boscobel Kt, Minister for Investment at the Department for International Trade and the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy to discuss the challenges facing German business with COVID-19 and the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement. However, as I have said on many occasions, we will not leave the UK, one of Germany`s most important locations and markets worldwide, and we look forward to a good future in the UK. We were very grateful to the Minister for answering all our questions and inviting us to another online meeting in few months to keep up to date.

We had a good online meeting on Wednesday, 28th April, from 2-2.50pm with some 15 members and the Minister from the German Embassy taking part.  Unfortunately Terry Sargeant, our Chairman and Chief Executive, could not join the meeting because he had an online meeting with his board in Germany so Dr Atenstaedt, our President, chaired it.

He talked about our online meeting with Lord Grimstone on 14 April which was very rewarding and that the Minister asked for another online meeting with us in a few months.  He has in the meantime established a new Investment Council to advise him on foreign investment into the UK.  We welcome that the chief executives of four German companies are on the Council, Deutsche Post DHL, RWE Renewables, Airbus UK and Siemens UK. 

Dr Atenstaedt also mentioned that he has invited the Rt Hon Steve Barclay MP, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, as a possible next speaker from Government and Terry Sargeant is going to ask a chief executive of a British company for another online meeting.

Finally, Dr Atenstaedt gave an overview of our `New Survey Amongst German Business in the UK: Many Post-Brexit Challenges`, the results of which we sent out last week to all 35 companies who took part, this is now on our website and was mentioned on LinkedIn.

We had a good fourth GIUK online meeting on Thursday, 10th June, from 2-2.45pm with some 17 members taking part, the chief executives of ANT Telecommunications, Atlas Elektronik, B Braun Medical, Boehringer Ingelheim, Efaflex, Fuchs Lubricants, HARTING, Helaba, Heller Machine Tools, Miele, Noerr, Rohde & Schwarz, Voith, Webasto and two members of our Advisory Council.  Unfortunately Terry could not join the meeting because of technical issues so I chaired it.

We had two speakers, Dr Antoni Mazur, MD of Atlas Elektronik UK and Mr Klaus Allion, MD of ANT Telecommunications who both spoke about the challenges their companies are currently facing.

I then mentioned that I have written to the Rt Hon Grant Shapps MP, Secretary of State for Transport about Germany coming off the UK Amber List for business, to the Rt Hon Steve Barclay MP, Chief Secretary to the Treasury asking for an online meeting with us and I have contacted Dr John Neill, Chairman of Unipart, also inviting him to speak at one of our online meetings.  Lastly, I mentioned that Terry and I agreed to again meet for dinner discussions etc at the Royal Over-Seas Club in London as from the autumn, when hopefully the COVID restrictions are lifted.

Some 10 Members of the GIUK Board and Advisory Council had an online `Teams` meeting with Oliver Schramm, Minister at the German Embassy and Head of their Department for Economic Affairs, Energy and Global Issues, yesterday morning as he will be leaving London next month.  We said farewell, thanked him for his great support of GIUK over the last 4 years, and wished him well in his new post as German Consul General in San Francisco, USA.

We had a very good Fifth GIUK Online Meeting last Thursday, chaired by myself as Terry was not able to join the meeting, with some 12 of our colleagues taking part, including Mr Julian Frohnecke, a Counsellor from the German Embassy.

Our speaker, Mr Armin Brestrich, General Manager of LBBW London Branch and Regional Head EMEA, gave an extensive and interesting presentation on how Brexit and COVID has affected the financial services in the UK.  This was followed by a discussion, in particular on how much the `pingdemic` is effecting our businesses.

We are very pleased to have been invited to a second online meeting with Lord Grimstone and this time we will also invite all our members to join, not only the members of our Board and Advisory Council as we did for our first online meeting with him on 14 April.  The Minister wants us to tell him how we are doing post-Brexit, in particular on Northern Ireland, with the pandemic and the `pingdemic`.  Just to emphasise, Lord Grimstone is responsible for all foreign investment in the UK.

Some 20 of our members joined our Sixth GIUK Online Meeting in 2021 to discuss the current challenges in British German trade. 

Our guest speaker was Rafe Courage, Country Director for the Department for International Trade in Germany and HM Consul General in Dusseldorf.  He gave a very comprehensive overview of the close political, economic and cultural relations between the UK and Germany today, mentioning in particular a recent cooperation agreement between the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and Greater Manchester.  We also had a contribution from Julian Frohnecke, Counsellor in the German Embassy in London.  This was followed by a discussion on our challenges post-Brexit and with Covid and the recent decline of exports from Germany to the UK.  The UK was the third most important destination before Brexit, it went down to ninth last year and is expected to be destination number eleven by the end of this year.  We also talked about the NI Protocol and about skills following the PMs speech the day before in Manchester, who wants a high wage, high skilled and high productive UK for the future.  Dr Atenstaedt mentioned that aspects of the German Dual Vocational Training Scheme would help to upskill the UK which he has already discussed with a number of Ministers in London.

We had a very good dinner discussion on 20 October in London with the Rt Hon Greg Hands MP, Minister of State for Energy, Clean Growth and Climate Change. This dinner discussion had to unfortunately be postponed from last year due to the pandemic. The Minister talked about the way forward towards a Green UK and cooperation between the UK and Germany in energy, particularly in off-shore wind and increasingly in hydrogen and on climate change, sharing a common agenda in the run-in to COP 26 and beyond.
We were very pleased that our Patron, the German Ambassador, HE Andreas Michaelis, was also present.