WSJ: China bought Italian drone company without anyone noticing ..
Every now and then Italian technology ends up in the Wall Street Journal , even if we would do without it. A Hong Kong company, controlled by a Chinese state-owned enterprise, bought the Italian firm Alp Aircraft Company, which supplies military drones to NATO three years ago. This is confidential and sensitive technology that may have been transferred to China for the benefit of the Chinese People's Army and the Italian government has claimed not to have been aware of it. This incident highlights how weak and superficial the controls in Europe are on Chinese investments. While many legislative revisions have been made recently, the economic damage from the pandemic has put the whole debate back, exposing our technology to dangerous escalations.
"The Wall Street Journal" reported on November 15 that Marius (Hong Kong) Information Technology Company, controlled by a Chinese state-owned enterprise, acquired the Italian military drone manufacturing company Alpi Aviation for 4 million euros for 75 % of the shares, and therefore invested 1.5 million euros to bring the technology to Chinese offices. The Italian government and the European authorities were not aware of this. The discovery of the transaction was purely coincidental and linked to other investigations.
Police felt the buyer's bid was too high, and investigations found that it was a Chinese state-owned company and a government agency, which crossed their holdings to make the transaction opaque. In the end, there was a Jiangsu administrative body and the Chinese State Council. An intervention of the highest level.
Italian prosecutors have accused six people of illegal know-how trafficking, also because the company is a supplier to NATO and the Air Force with the Strix mini portable drone, armed, even used in Afghanistan
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The WSJ article : China bought an Italian drone company without anyone noticing .. comes from ScenariEconomici.it .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/wsj-la-cina-ha-acqusitato-azienda-italiana-di-droni-senza-che-nessuno-se-ne-accorgesse/ on Thu, 18 Nov 2021 08:00:30 +0000.