Regime Change at the World Economic Forum (WEF): For Better or for Worse?

Regime Change at the World Economic Forum (WEF): For Better or for Worse?

Peter Koenig

On April 20, 2025, Easter Sunday, the Board of Trustees of the World Economic Forum (WEF) called for an extraordinary meeting behind closed doors.

The Board of Trustees includes among others BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, former US Vice President Al Gore, Jordan’s Queen Rania Al Abdullah and European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde as members. BlackRock is the WEF’s most important sponsor. Thus, BlackRock’s voice must weigh accordingly.

What they debated was a new Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article, apparently based on an anonymous whistleblower letter, this time accusing Klaus Schwab and his wife Hilde Schwab of misusing the WEF Foundation’s money and property for personal purposes. Mr. Schwab apparently also used junior staff to withdraw thousands of dollars from ATM machines for his personal use. Verbally quoting the WSJ: The Schwabs, “mixed their personal affairs with the Forum’s resources.”

The WSJ article also repeated accusations of discrimination, sexual harassment and nepotism within the organization, points already mentioned in a WSJ’s article about a year ago. See this.

The Board opened an immediate investigation into these allegations. Schwab said he would take legal action against the WSJ and decided – or was told – to resign immediately from the Board’s chairmanship. He stepped back last year as President and CEO of the WEF, but assumed the Chair for the Board of Trustees with a timeline through 2027. This timeline was cut short by the whistleblower and the WSJ article.

Screenshot from WSJ

Other WEF executives, especially the Schwab’s children, also exited following a board probe into workplace culture, a topic that has plagued the WEF for years, but came to the fore the first time a year ago.

With immediate effect the Board decided on an interim replacement for Klaus Schwab, a former longtime President and CEO of Nestlé, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe. He was CEO and chairman of the Nestlé Group from 1997 to 2008. Brabeck was deputy chair of the WEF’s Board of Trustees.

Brabeck is not less controversial than Schwab. He was and still is a staunch defender of the idea that water is not a public good. Mr. Brabeck is perhaps best known for declaring that water is not a human right, but a market commodity. When he led Nestlé, the food giant was one of the global leaders in the privatization of water. Brabeck is also an aggressive promoter of GMOs (genetically modified organisms).

GMO food may have significant negative health effects and especially, it does not allow farmers to collect seeds from one harvest to the next. This has severe implications for farmers, especially in so-called developing countries, or the Global South.

India is a case in point, where GMO seeds were sold without telling the farmers that the plants’ seeds could not reproduce, i.e., could not be used for next year’s harvest. When the farmers realized, they could not afford buying every year GMO seeds, thousands committed suicide, as they were unable to maintain and feed their families.

Nestlé under Mr. Brabeck was also at the forefront of a scandal about powdered milk that should replace breastfeeding.

Nestlé especially targeted Africa, where the product was introduced against healthy common breastfeeding habits. As we also know in the west, breastfeeding provides babies and children with a basic, strong immune system, which powdered milk for infants does not.

In addition, rising prices of Nestlé’s powdered milk made that women could no longer afford it, and since they did not start with breastfeeding, they did not produce breast milk. With the combination of unnatural powdered milk, lack of breastmilk and the natural immune system, many babies got sick and often died.

See this for more details (watch below):

Mr. Brabeck is known for his anti-human and anti-Human Rights stance on many issues growing to ever-more importance in the current geo-political and economic environment we are living.

Mr. Brabeck certainly does not make the WEF a better place. Perhaps to the contrary. For sure, a number of investigations – WEF internals and externals – and lawsuits are already ongoing or pending.

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