British data centres at the heart of national security scandal, part-owned by a Chinese arms manufacturer. The 2nd part of UKCT’s investigation into Global Switch examines the company’s ultimate owners and probes the nature of the data, when mitigation took place, and Cabinet Office secrecy.
In October, UK-China Transparency (UKCT) exposed the apparent cover-up of a national security scandal surrounding Global Switch, which operates critical data centres in London.
UKCT compared the silence around the acquisition in the UK to the multi-year public saga in Australia, which included public admissions that Global Switch centres carried sensitive Australian government data, a multi-billion-dollar migration plan, and mitigation measures described by then Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison as “24/7 Defence security presence, remote CCTV monitoring and regular security audits”.
It has been suggested by a former Downing Street advisor and a former security minister that Global Switch centres in the UK also carried or stored highly sensitive data.
In this, the second part of UKCT’s investigation, the question of precisely which Chinese actors bought Global Switch is addressed, as is the aftermath of the initial reporting late last year, and an update on UKCT’s work to secure more information from HM Government.
The acquisition of Global Switch took place in stages.
First, a consortium of 12 Chinese investors named Elegant Jubilee Ltd acquired 49% of Global Switch in December 2016. At the time, British officials, politicians and media were distracted in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum – not to mention that it was the Christmas holidays.
In December 2017, Elegant Jubilee purchased a further 2% of Global Switch, increasing its stake to a controlling 51% overall. Weeks later, in early January 2018, the only substantial mainstream media coverage of the takeover appeared in the Daily Mail. The article suggested that the deal’s passage during the festive period had resulted in insufficient scrutiny, citing two concerned MPs and a security expert. It is also reported a comment by a “spokesman for the Department of Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy… [who] said the deal was ‘a commercial matter’.”
In July 2018, Strategic IDC Ltd., a consortium of five Chinese entities, purchased a further 24.99% of Global Switch.
In August 2019, an existing lead investor, Jiangsu Shagang Steel Group (JSS), acquired the remaining 24.01% of the company (through a JSS subsidiary called Tough Expert Ltd.).
Through its involvement in the initial consortia, its purchase in August 2019, and further purchases of Strategic IDC shares in 2020, JSS controlled 51.8% of the company by December 2020.
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Much of the coverage of Global Switch’s acquisition focuses on JSS, which is often billed as China’s largest private steel company.
JSS, which open-source research suggests provides some specialised steel products for China’s military, was founded in 1975. The man who transformed it into the industrial giant it is today was Shen Wenrong, a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) member who long served as JSS’s Party Secretary and passed away aged 78 in June 2024. According to a government notice about his memorial service, Shen attended the CCP’s National Congress twice, received various national awards, and contributed to the CCP’s United Front work.
The senior Shen had already stepped back significantly by 2016, when he ceased to serve as JSS’s chairman and reportedly handed over control to his son, Shen Bin. The acquisition of Global Switch followed the next year, marking it out as a key early project of the relatively unproven junior Shen, also a CCP member, doubtless keen to demonstrate Party loyalty and his suitability as successor to an unusual non-state-owned behemoth. Shen junior shares with his father an apparent zeal for the Party, having the distinction of being vice-chairman of the All-China Federation of Industry & Commerce, a high-level national organ under the CCP’s United Front Work Department.
Then again, the Global Switch deal was part of a long, embattled restructuring saga at JSS, for which the most detailed English-language reporting can be found in a 2021 article by Beijing-based business news outlet Caixin Global. The saga involved, amongst other things, various run-ins with the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC), including “an insider trading investigation in which its shares were suspended from trading for a record 788 days. […] [JSS’s] application to issue shares, purchase assets in cash, and fundraise had not been approved because the applicant had failed to fully disclose overseas policy risks to the core competitiveness of its underlying assets, giving rise to uncertainties about profitability.”
The policy risks in question concerned Western national security concerns about Chinese ownership of data centres.
A “Chinese state-owned enterprise”
Besides JSS, the Chinese state owns perhaps as much as 30% of the remaining shares in Global Switch, through a range of entities involved in the purchasing consortia.
The most important of these is AVIC Trus, a subsidiary of the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC. In mid-2025, Global Switch described AVIC Trust as its second-biggest shareholder. This appears to have been the case for some time.
Described vaguely as a “Chinese state-owned enterprise” by ITV in its recent coverage of the Global Switch issue, AVIC is in fact one of the most significant Chinese defence conglomerates. AVIC produces fighter jets, bombers, drones and other military products to the People’s Liberation Army. AVIC was sanctioned by the United States in 2020. The company’s cooperation with Russia includes joint development with a Russian company of a new military helicopter.
AVIC Trust is a key player in China’s so-called ‘shadow banking sector’, in which non-bank financial institutions move capital without the oversight that is standard in the formal banking sector. AVIC Trust and other AVIC group financial services companies have explicitly stated their goal of facilitating investments in support of national strategy and national security. For example, material published by one of the AVIC’s intermediate subsidiaries (which exerts control over AVIC Trust) describes the company’s focus on military modernisation and refers to its Party office’s “national security management” work.
In April 2025, AVIC Trust came under the intervening custodianship of other state-owned institutions after it began defaulting and delaying payments on key products. AVIC Trust has had representation on Global Switch’s board since 2020.
What was billed as a ‘private takeover’ of Global Switch, then, had rather more to it. Even disregarding respects in which it can influence ‘private companies’ and shareholders, the Chinese state – indeed, entities part of the Chinese military-industrial complex – was directly involved in the takeover and nominally has significance influence over the company via direct shareholding and board presence.
In its original publication on the issue, UKCT did not state that it knew what sensitive British government data, if any, was hosted in or carried through Global Switch’s London data centres. Some contrasting information relating to this question has been put into the public domain since.
Speaking to The Times, the former special adviser to Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings, gave the following account:
“The Strap system was compromised. All sorts of systems were compromised. Fundamental infrastructure for transferring the most sensitive data around the British state was compromised for a long time. For years.”
The article featuring the interview of Cummings also reported a comment from former security minister Tom Tugendhat MP, who said:
“I don’t want to go into the details, but the gist of what Dominic Cummings has put out is correct.”
The word ‘gist’ may be important… On LinkedIn, former director of the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre, Ciaran Martin, pushed back against the specifics of Cummings’s claims. Martin wrote the following:
“… I can confirm that the Government’s recent statement that “it is untrue to claim that the systems we use to transfer the most sensitive government information have been compromised” is, to my knowledge, accurate.
[…]
“…it is categorically untrue that in 2020 briefings were given to the effect that the Chinese state had compromised the bespoke systems used for circulating Strap and other highly classified state secrets. Both the Cabinet Secretaries (Lords Sedwill and Case) who served in 2020 have confirmed to me that:
”(i) they were unaware of ever receiving any briefing about Chinese state compromise of the classified IT systems used for the Government’s most sensitive information;
(ii) they did not brief the then Prime Minister or his Chief Advisor to that effect.
”It would have fallen to the National Cyber Security Centre to support the Cabinet Secretary in a breach of the kind alleged. There was no such NCSC operation in 2020 or the preceding years. Top secret networks are built, operated, secured, and monitored on an entirely different basis than the normal Internet-based systems used by most of the rest of the government (and by the private sector and the rest of the economy). So it does not follow that evidence of harmful Chinese cyber operations against the UK, which is routinely briefed to Ministers, advisers and senior officials, extended to this entirely separate set of systems. There is no basis for the claim that large volumes of British intelligence and other extremely sensitive information were compromised by the Chinese state in this period.”
These are very specific statements about which data was not exposed to compromise. There has been no denial from the government that some data was exposed to compromise. Whether the government knows it was actually compromised is another matter again. UKCT continues to investigate this.
In July 2025, UKCT sent a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to the Cabinet Office seeking information about government contracts involving Global Switch, Cabinet Office meetings about the company, and due diligence or other research conducted in relation to ownership transfer over the period 2016-2020.
The Cabinet Office responded that this request was too broad and asked UKCT to refine the request. UKCT did so, but its first refined request apparently remained too broad. A second refined request asked only for “the dates of any Cabinet Office meetings about Global Switch or its owner, Jiangsu Shagang Group, from June 2019 to December 2020 inclusive, including the titles of officials/ministers present, and redacted minutes.”
Having requested that UKCT send a second refined request, the Cabinet Office then ignored it. UKCT alerted the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), who contacted the Cabinet Office.
The Cabinet Office finally issued a response to the request on the 3rd of December. In it, the Cabinet Office refuses to disclose the requested information on the basis that doing so would harm the commercial interests of Global Switch and the Cabinet Office. UKCT requested an internal review. The review resulted in no change of position. UKCT has taken the matter to the Information Commissioner’s Office.
The question is whether the Cabinet Office’s refusal is intended to protect the national interest, or to protect the narrower interests of whoever or whatever body is responsible for the fiasco.
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