The takeover of taxpayer-backed OneWeb by Eutelsat is set to be confirmed this week.

The sale of the satellite maker has raised concerns as Beijing-backed China Investment Corp owns a 5% stake in Eutelsat, according to stock market filings, meaning that the sale essentially hands China a stake in the spying technology used by the Five Eyes intelligence sharing alliance, which includes the UK and US.

According to sources, OneWeb will be subsumed into French-listed Eutelsat with plans to apply for a secondary listing in the UK.

As well as a member of the UK Government being given a seat on Eutelsat’s board of directors, their is also insistence that the takeover will not affect the UK’s “golden share” in OneWeb, meaning any move of the company’s London headquarters can be vetoed on national security grounds.

OneWeb was originally intended to serve as a competitor to Elon Musk’s Starlink, however it’s sale leaves Britain without a major player in the ever more competitive communication satellite space.

What is the Five Eyes Alliance?

In short, the Five Eyes alliance is a group of five English-speaking countries that have agreed to share enemy signals intelligence with each other – signals intelligence being information learned from intercepting digital or otherwise electronic communications.

The countries that make up the Five Eyes are the UK, US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and the information gathered by any one is shared with the other members.

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Beyond this, it has been claimed that each country also gathers intelligence on other members of the Five Eyes alliance, and this information is then shared back to the country that has been spied on. This is done to evade laws regarding a country spying on its own citizens, while also maintaining a surveillance profile on those at home.

As it stands, OneWeb currently runs contracts on behalf of this alliance and with Eutelsat – which is partly owned by a Beijing-backed sovereign wealth fund – in line to takeover the company, it inherently causes the potential to comprise sensitive information garnered from the alliance.

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