Sir Richard Branson with Virgin Galactic pilots, staffers and investors. To his right is Mohamed Badawy Al-Husseiny, CEO of Aabar, which made a $280 million in Virgin Galactic.
US inquiry into sale of Virgin Galactic stake to Arab investor
The Times
The United States has launched a national security investigation into the proposed sale of a stake in Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic space company to Arab investors.
The Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States (CFIUS) is understood to have begun a review of Sir Richard’s sale of a 32 per cent stake in Galactic to Aabar Investments for $280 million (£170 million). The move has caused alarm in banking circles in Abu Dhabi and could raise tensions between the US and the Gulf.
Bank insiders told The Times that there was a growing concern locally that the deal could be amended or even blocked because Aabar, Sir Richard’s proposed partner, is ultimately controlled by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, a member of the Abu Dhabi ruling family. Skeikh Mansour, a half-brother of the ruler of Abu Dhabi, also bought Manchester City Football Club last year for £200 million.
CFIUS, part of the US Treasury Department, reviews all acquisitions by foreigners in companies deemed important to national security. The committee, chaired by the Secretary of Treasury, includes representatives of Government departments including Defence and Homeland Security….
Will Whitehorn, president of Virgin Galactic, said that he had “absolute confidence that the deal would be completed as billedâ€. He declined to comment further.
Read the full story.
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we can’t call “space” the 100 km. altitude nor call “astronauts” those who will fly two minutes at 101 km. … so, it don’t seems a big concern if some Arab investors want to help Branson to lift his “astronauts” to “space”
while, I insist to say that they must be much more concerned by the LOTS of billion$ burned to develop the Ares-1 rocket (a further $1.5 billion, I’ve read) since it CAN’T fly then it’s already DEAD, as explained in this article:
http://www.ghostnasa.com/posts2/058ares1dead.html
ps – now my article has a b/w version for those who don’t like texts with too much colors and BOLD
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Quite a few other companies are going other companies have taken pains to set their products up as being “ITAR free” so as to avoid this sort of problem.
For example, take a look at the recent article on the Sensonor High Performance MEMS Gyro Sensor, profiled at http://www.ecnasiamag.com/article-27119-sensonorlauncheshighperformancememsgyrosensorsar100enablingapplicationsinharshenvironmentsthatrequir-Asia.html.
And so it is now clear that Burt (and Richard) should have set up shop a hundred miles or so south of where they did. And then they would not have had to put up with the FAA and other alphabet soup agencies.