Two Flemish people, who worked for the Belgian aeronautics company Sabca, which is co-owned by the Belgian state, are working as directors at EANAN, a high-tech drone company based in Dubai founded in December 2022. One of them, who worked on the creation of these drones, has been CEO since last March. The other went to Dubai in May 2023, after more than 30 years of service at Sabca, where he led the EANAN drone team for a year.
From the outside, EANAN, which has the UAE flag on its logo, is a promising start-up run by an Emirates sheikh with Westerners, such as a German and a Swede. However, De Tijd and the German newspaper Die Welt discovered that when EANAN was founded, 70 percent of the shares were owned by a Russian. Russia held this majority stake through a company that was also only founded in 2022, in a Dubai free trade zone. In December 2022 and January 2023, three trunks with models of Russian drones were sent to Dubai via this company. Last May, a fourth drone model arrived directly from Russia at EANAN.
The models were sent by the Russian company Transport of the Future, whose CEO consulted with President Vladimir Putin in February 2023 about catching up on the development and large-scale production of its own drones. EANAN can therefore do what a Russian company is no longer allowed to do: use Western parts and experts for the further development of its drones.
