DCW Frontier Focus Edition 21

DCW  FRONTIER FOCUS

Your Weekly Technology Intelligence Brief  |  13th May 2026

Intelligence, Security, Infrastructure, Energy & Quantum Innovation

Welcome to this week's edition of DCW Frontier Focus, your essential briefing on the transformative technologies reshaping our digital economy. This edition covers the most significant developments across artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, energy systems, digital infrastructure, and quantum computing from the past seven days.

This week's defining theme is governance catching up with technology, or rather failing to. Artificial intelligence is reshaping boardrooms at speed: IBM reports that three in four major companies have now appointed a chief AI officer, while Lloyds Banking Group became the first FTSE blue-chip to deploy AI directly in its boardroom. At the same time, the CMA has launched fresh investigations into AI pricing algorithms, and US spy agencies are in open competition with the Commerce Department over who should control AI regulation. The Microsoft-OpenAI partnership has moved to a non-exclusive arrangement, cracking open the cloud AI market to broader competition.

On energy, the Iran-US conflict entered a new and more dangerous phase. President Trump declared the ceasefire 'on massive life support' after rejecting Iran's latest proposal as 'a piece of garbage', and oil settled higher for a third consecutive session as peace hopes faded further. Asian LNG importers Japan and South Korea are ramping up coal-fired power in response to gas supply disruptions, and the US Energy Information Administration revised its earlier forecasts sharply upwards, conceding the supply disruption is far worse and longer-lasting than first modelled. Meanwhile, a scandal in Georgia revealed that a major data centre campus had secretly drawn 29 million gallons of water over 15 months before residents noticed the drop in pressure, raising uncomfortable questions about infrastructure governance.

In cybersecurity, a critical new vulnerability in the widely used Exim email system has been disclosed, capable of causing complete server compromise via a memory corruption flaw. The ShinyHunters group extracted 275 million records from the Canvas learning platform and extracted a ransom payment. And Google's Threat Intelligence Group identified what it describes as the first confirmed case of an attacker using AI to discover and weaponise a zero-day vulnerability in the wild.

In digital infrastructure, the UK's grid constraints are coming sharply into focus: connection dates for new large-scale compute projects now extend into the early 2030s in some areas, and industry analysts are warning that the UK cannot simply build its way to AI leadership through brute-force scaling. In quantum computing, new international research collaboration between France's Quobly and Foxconn's R and D arm has produced an open-source toolbox for simulating fault-tolerant quantum algorithms, while Quantinuum has published a breakthrough in error correction that reduces computational overhead and brings practical quantum computing one step closer.

🤖  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

The AI Boardroom Arrives: Chief AI Officers, Board Bots, and the Governance Gap

Artificial intelligence has crossed a threshold this week that few predicted would arrive quite so quickly: it is now sitting inside corporate boardrooms. A new IBM report published on 12th May, drawing on responses from more than 2,000 organisations, found that 76 per cent have now established a Chief AI Officer role, up sharply from just 26 per cent in 2025. The finding confirms that what began as an experiment in individual business units has become a board-level governance responsibility almost overnight.

The most concrete example of this shift came from the UK. Lloyds Banking Group became the first FTSE-listed blue-chip company to deploy a specialist AI 'board bot' in its boardroom, supplied by advisory firm Board Intelligence. Senior executives and directors are using the system to review confidential material, prepare for meetings, and check for potential bias in decision-making. The system has been trained across cybersecurity, sustainability, financial analysis, and mergers and acquisitions. Lloyds is currently using it primarily for meeting preparation, but the developer's longer-term vision is for AI to assist in real-time governance decisions at the highest level of the organisation.

Separately, the Microsoft and OpenAI partnership was restructured this week, moving from an exclusive arrangement to a non-exclusive one. This opens up greater commercial competition in the cloud AI market and is likely to accelerate the pace at which competing AI providers can approach enterprise customers that were previously effectively locked into a single stack. For organisations evaluating AI procurement, the practical implication is greater choice, but also greater complexity in assessing which tools are appropriate for which regulated functions.

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority has been sharpening its focus on AI governance, with new investigations launched into algorithmic pricing practices and fresh guidance issued on the use of agentic AI in consumer-facing contexts. The EU AI Act's August 2026 deadlines for high-risk AI systems remain in force despite stalled amendment negotiations. In the US, intelligence agencies are now in open competition with the Commerce Department over who should lead AI regulation, a battle that will shape the global regulatory environment for frontier AI systems over the coming years.

Strategic Implication

The arrival of AI in boardrooms is not a future-tense story. Lloyds' deployment this week, and the IBM finding that three in four large organisations now have a Chief AI Officer, means the governance conversation has moved from planning to execution. For UK organisations in regulated sectors, the FCA's ongoing AI workstream and the EU AI Act's provisions for high-risk AI are the frameworks that apply now, not eventually. The restructuring of the Microsoft-OpenAI arrangement is also a procurement signal: the assumption that enterprise AI means a single-vendor relationship is no longer reliable, and organisations should be building architectural flexibility into their AI strategies from the outset.

Google Identifies First AI-Weaponised Zero-Day; US Spy Agencies Seek Control of AI Oversight

Google's Threat Intelligence Group published findings this week confirming the first known case of an attacker using AI to discover and weaponise a zero-day vulnerability. Google states it identified and stopped the planned mass attack before it could cause widespread damage, but the confirmation that AI is now being used offensively to find software flaws in real-world attacks represents a qualitative shift in the threat landscape rather than merely an escalation in volume.

The news arrived alongside a Washington Post report that US spy agencies, including the CIA and NSA, are seeking significantly expanded authority over the regulation of frontier AI systems, in direct competition with the Commerce Department. The intelligence community's position is that advanced AI models represent a national security risk that commercial regulators are not equipped to assess or control. The outcome of this internal US government battle will have implications for how allied governments, including the UK, approach AI procurement, export controls, and security classification of AI tools used in sensitive functions.

Anthropic's Claude Security model, the enterprise version of its Mythos security system, continues to attract both defensive and offensive attention from the research community. The model's ability to scan code for vulnerabilities at machine speed is increasingly being assessed not just for its defensive potential but for the degree to which the same capability could be used to probe systems at a pace and scale that current detection tools are not designed to handle.

Strategic Implication

The confirmation of AI-assisted zero-day discovery in the wild means that the timeline between vulnerability disclosure and active exploitation is shortening further. Organisations with significant internet-facing infrastructure should review their patch prioritisation frameworks to account for this acceleration. The US intelligence agencies' push for greater AI regulatory authority is also worth monitoring: the outcome will shape export control frameworks and procurement restrictions in ways that could affect which AI tools UK organisations can use in security-sensitive contexts.

🔐  CYBERSECURITY

Critical Exim Email Vulnerability Disclosed; Canvas Learning Platform Pays Ransom After 275 Million Records Stolen

A critical vulnerability in Exim, the open-source email transfer system used by a very large proportion of internet mail servers, was disclosed on 12th May. Tracked as CVE-2026-45185 and nicknamed 'Dead.Letter', the flaw is a memory corruption vulnerability triggered when an attacker sends a specific sequence of commands during an encrypted connection. Successful exploitation could allow an attacker to take complete control of the affected server. Given Exim's widespread deployment across corporate, government, and internet service provider infrastructure, this vulnerability warrants immediate attention from any organisation running it.

A major educational technology incident also concluded this week. Instructure, the company behind the Canvas learning management system used by universities and schools worldwide, confirmed that it paid a ransom to the ShinyHunters extortion group after attackers stole approximately 275 million records containing usernames, email addresses, and course information from roughly 9,000 organisations. The breach was initially contained but a second wave of activity was detected on 7th May, with attackers defacing login portals at around 330 institutions and setting a 12th May deadline for payment. The incident affected nearly every major university system in the United States and a significant number of institutions in the United Kingdom and other countries.

The cybersecurity mergers and acquisitions environment continues to accelerate. CrowdStrike's acquisition of Seraphic Security in January 2026 and Zscaler's purchase of SquareX in February kicked off what analysts are now describing as a browser-security arms race. OpenAI's Trusted Access for Cyber programme, launched in April, has effectively designated Palo Alto, CrowdStrike, and Zscaler as the preferred platform consolidators in the enterprise security market. Organisations renewing security contracts in the coming months should be assessing whether their current providers are investing in AI-native detection capabilities at the required pace, or whether they are at risk of being left behind as the market consolidates around a smaller number of AI-powered platforms.

Action Required

Two immediate priorities this week. First, if your organisation runs Exim as a mail transfer agent, apply the available patch for CVE-2026-45185 as a matter of urgency. The memory corruption flaw is technically accessible to any attacker who can reach the affected server, and the timeline to widespread exploitation following a public disclosure of this kind is typically measured in days. Second, if your organisation uses Canvas as a learning or training platform, verify which user data may have been included in the breach and review your notification obligations under UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018. The volume of records stolen means the incident is likely to generate regulatory attention in multiple jurisdictions.

Agentic AI in Production: The Security Gap Nobody Is Talking About

A significant commentary published this week by The Hacker News identified what it describes as one of the most underappreciated security risks in enterprise environments today: AI agents are already running in production systems across a wide range of organisations, executing tasks, consuming data, and taking actions, and in most cases the security team has little understanding of what these systems are doing or how to defend them.

The article argues that the industry conversation about agentic AI has been framed largely as a policy question, about whether to allow, restrict, or monitor AI agents, when the more urgent question is whether security professionals actually understand the technology well enough to defend it at all. The parallel drawn is instructive: just as it is impossible to configure a firewall well without understanding networking, it is impossible to secure an AI agent without understanding how it reasons, what data it can access, and what actions it can take without human intervention.

This structural gap is being exploited. North Korean state-linked operators have continued using AI-generated content and deepfake video calls to target technology and cryptocurrency firms, with estimated losses of tens of millions of dollars in recent months. A new variant of the TrickMo Android banking trojan, using The Open Network for command-and-control, has been observed targeting banking and cryptocurrency users across France, Italy, and Austria, adding SSH tunnelling and network routing capabilities that make infected devices function as programmable traffic relays for further attacks.

Strategic Implication

The agentic AI security gap is not a future problem. If your organisation has deployed any AI agent, chatbot, automated workflow, or AI-assisted process that connects to internal systems or handles sensitive data, that system represents a live attack surface that your security team may not be equipped to defend. The most immediate action is a simple one: identify every AI agent currently running in your organisation, document what data it can access and what actions it can take, and assess whether your security monitoring tools have visibility into its behaviour. Most do not.

⚡  ENERGY TECHNOLOGY

Ceasefire 'On Massive Life Support': Oil Settles Higher for Third Day as Peace Hopes Fade

The Iran conflict entered a bleaker phase this week. President Trump publicly dismissed Iran's latest ceasefire proposal as 'a piece of garbage' and declared the ceasefire 'on massive life support', while US officials briefed news organisations that Trump is actively weighing further military action against Iran to increase pressure on its nuclear programme. Oil settled higher for a third consecutive session on 12th May as the stark gap between US and Iranian positions raised widespread concern that supply disruptions will be prolonged well beyond any near-term resolution.

The US Energy Information Administration issued a significant admission this week, revising its earlier forecasts to reflect a far larger and longer-lasting impact on global oil supplies than its models had initially projected. The revised assessment explicitly assumes the Strait of Hormuz will remain substantially closed through at least the end of May, and signals that the agency's earlier estimates significantly underestimated the scale of the disruption. This revision carries weight: the EIA's forecasts are the primary reference point for government and corporate energy planning in most Western economies.

The downstream effects are spreading rapidly. Japan and South Korea, the two largest LNG importers in Asia, ramped up coal-fired electricity generation in April and into early May as the war limited gas supplies and pushed prices sharply higher. European travellers are beginning to build 'plan B' flexibility into summer holiday bookings in response to elevated jet fuel costs and disrupted Middle East routes, with airlines continuing to pass on fuel surcharges. US power transformer buyers are scrambling for import slots as domestic production is unable to meet accelerated demand. Nuclear energy is also attracting fresh government interest: the US Department of Energy is reported to be considering a programme offering utilities billions of dollars in financing to secure long-lead-time components for large reactors, a sign that the energy security calculus has shifted significantly since the conflict began.

Strategic Implication

The EIA's admission that its earlier forecasts were significantly wrong should prompt any organisation that has modelled the Hormuz disruption as a short-term shock to revisit its assumptions. The revised picture is of a sustained disruption with no clear resolution timeline, and oil prices settling above the $100 mark as a new baseline for planning purposes. Organisations with energy-intensive operations, fuel-dependent logistics, or exposure to food and fertiliser supply chains should be updating their scenario planning accordingly. The nuclear financing story is also worth monitoring: a government-backed drive to accelerate nuclear construction in the US would have significant supply chain implications for specialist engineering and materials across the sector.

Data Centres and Water: The Hidden Resource Crisis Beneath the AI Build-Out

A significant and uncomfortable story broke this week in Georgia, in the United States. The Politico news organisation reported that Quality Technology Services, the Blackstone-owned developer behind a 615-acre data centre campus 20 miles south of Atlanta, had drawn approximately 29 million gallons of water through two connections the county did not know existed, over a period of 15 months. The unauthorised water use was only discovered when local residents in a nearby housing development reported unusually low water pressure. The county declined to fine the company, instead issuing a retroactive charge of just under $150,000.

The incident is a microcosm of a much wider tension. Data centres, and particularly the high-density AI training facilities that are being built at pace across the United Kingdom and the United States, require enormous quantities of water for cooling. In the UK context, the House of Lords heard evidence this week that data centres are expecting water supplies to be maintained even as scarcity increases in the regions where major clusters of facilities are being planned. With 28 planned UK sites in areas served by Thames Water alone, the collision between AI infrastructure growth and water availability is no longer a theoretical concern.

The World Economic Forum published analysis this week arguing that the deeper lesson of the Hormuz crisis for AI is not simply the oil price shock, but the exposure of the entire physical supply chain that AI depends on: helium from Qatar for semiconductor cooling, bromine from Israel for chip production, sulfur for copper processing, and energy from the Gulf for data centre power. The conclusion is stark: AI may run on software, but its future depends on molecules, ships, and substations. Countries and companies that build AI infrastructure assuming stable global supply chains are building on uncertain foundations.

Strategic Implication

The Georgia water scandal is likely to accelerate regulatory attention on data centre resource consumption in the UK and across Europe. Organisations building or investing in AI infrastructure should expect water usage to become a material disclosure and compliance issue within the next 12 to 18 months, alongside the carbon footprint questions that are already emerging. For boards with net zero commitments, the energy and water footprint of cloud services is rapidly moving from a footnote in sustainability reports to a primary disclosure item. The World Economic Forum's supply chain analysis is also a useful strategic prompt: organisations evaluating long-term AI infrastructure investment should be asking their providers explicit questions about supply chain resilience, not just uptime and latency.

🏗️  DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE

UK AI Infrastructure Hits Grid Reality: Connection Dates Slip Into the 2030s

The UK's data centre ambitions are running into a hard physical constraint that no amount of planning reform can quickly resolve: the electricity grid. Analysis published this week by Data Centre Review confirmed that in West London, long established as the UK's primary digital infrastructure corridor, grid capacity is already constrained. Securing new high-voltage connections for large-scale compute projects now takes years, and in some cases connection dates have been pushed back to the early 2030s. The challenge is not simply one of generating capacity; transmission bottlenecks, substation upgrades, and local distribution improvements all shape delivery timelines, and none of these can be accelerated quickly.

The scale of the underlying commitment nonetheless remains striking. The UK government's AI Opportunities Action Plan, the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, and the Artificial Intelligence Growth Zones initiative represent the most significant combined package of digital infrastructure support in the country's history. The initial AI Growth Zones are located in Oxfordshire, South and North Wales, and the North East, each designed to offer fast-track planning approvals and improved grid access. Google's five billion pound UK data centre programme, Microsoft's $15 billion capital expenditure programme, the NScale AI campus at Loughton in Essex, and the ten billion pound campus in Blyth led by Blackstone are all at various stages of planning or early construction.

Data Centre LIVE, which is taking place at Exhibition White City on 20th and 21st May, will bring together senior leaders from Google, BBC, Schneider Electric, and STACK Infrastructure to address the operational realities of this expansion. The agenda reflects the sector's current preoccupations: high-density AI racks, power volatility from large GPU clusters, supply chain constraints on critical components, and the need to operate more efficiently within defined electrical and thermal limits. The message from industry analysts is consistent: the UK cannot simply scale through brute force. Competitive advantage will favour operators who combine high-density capability with operational efficiency, not those who simply add more megawatts.

Strategic Implication

The grid constraint story has direct implications for organisations that are planning AI infrastructure investments in the UK. If your compute roadmap depends on new data centre capacity coming online in the South East before 2030, you should be verifying that assumption with your infrastructure providers now, not when the project is already in procurement. The government's AI Growth Zones offer a genuine path to faster grid access and planning approvals in specific locations, but the zones are not uniformly distributed and the energy price challenge in those locations remains. Organisations with the flexibility to site infrastructure in Scotland or the North East may find materially better conditions than those anchored to the existing London corridor.

Telecommunications and DePIN: Connectivity Under Pressure

Beneath the data centre headlines, the telecommunications and physical network infrastructure that underpins the digital economy is under its own pressures. SATLINE opened a new UK data centre this week specifically designed to deliver faster and more reliable satellite connectivity, reflecting the growing importance of space-based communications infrastructure as a complement to terrestrial fibre. The facility is part of a broader shift in how resilient connectivity is being built, particularly for organisations in locations where terrestrial infrastructure is constrained or unreliable.

The UK government's designation of data centres as critical national infrastructure, and the proposed new cybersecurity standards under the forthcoming Cyber Resilience Bill, are beginning to reshape the regulatory environment for physical digital infrastructure. For operators of networks and connectivity services, the direction of travel is towards higher minimum standards of resilience, security monitoring, and incident reporting, mirroring the framework already established for financial market infrastructure and utilities.

Decentralised Physical Infrastructure Networks, or DePIN, continue to attract investment as an alternative model for building out digital infrastructure in areas where centralised operators have not invested. The model, which uses token-based incentives to coordinate independent operators of physical infrastructure including wireless networks, storage, and compute, is gaining traction as a practical complement to public and private investment in compute access for smaller organisations and research institutions.

Strategic Implication

The Cyber Resilience Bill's proposed new standards for data centre operators are likely to include mandatory incident reporting, minimum security monitoring requirements, and resilience testing, requirements that will represent a significant compliance uplift for smaller operators who have not previously been subject to this level of scrutiny. Organisations that own or operate data centre infrastructure, or that have significant contractual dependencies on specific facilities, should begin mapping their exposure to the forthcoming requirements now. The DePIN model is also worth monitoring as a procurement option for organisations seeking compute access outside the hyperscaler ecosystem, particularly as the government's AI Opportunities Action Plan begins to direct public support toward alternative models.

⚛️  QUANTUM COMPUTING

Quobly and Foxconn Release Open-Source Quantum Toolbox; Is China Really Winning the Quantum Race?

An international research collaboration between French quantum start-up Quobly and Hon Hai Research Institute, the R and D division of Foxconn, has released a new open-source numerical toolbox for simulating a critical area of quantum computing called Quantum Phase Estimation, or QPE. The toolbox is designed to help researchers explore how QPE algorithms would actually perform in practice, including the resources they would require, without needing access to a full-scale quantum computer that does not yet exist. It supports full circuit simulations for systems of up to approximately 20 qubits and can run on a standard laptop, making it accessible to a much wider research community than the hardware it ultimately simulates.

The release matters because QPE is considered one of the cornerstone algorithms of fault-tolerant quantum computing, with major potential applications in drug discovery, materials science, and financial modelling. The gap between understanding QPE in theory and being able to simulate its practical resource requirements has been a significant obstacle to realistic planning for quantum applications. This toolbox aims to bridge that gap.

A more strategically provocative question was raised this week by a cybersecurity workshop focused on Chinese quantum capabilities: is the West flying blind about China's progress? The analysis presented highlighted that China now files around 60 per cent of the world's quantum patents, while the United States dominates the high-value international patent families that typically correspond to genuine commercial innovation. Many of China's flagship quantum claims, including machines that reportedly rival IBM and Google's leading systems, cannot be independently verified by outside researchers. The warning from Nobel laureate John Martinis is gaining renewed attention: his assessment that the US may be only 'nanoseconds ahead' of China in the quantum race is difficult to dismiss, and equally difficult to verify.

Strategic Implication

The Quobly-Foxconn toolbox is a practical resource for any organisation that wants to begin evaluating whether quantum computing could be relevant to their specific operational or research problems, without making significant infrastructure investments. The China question has more immediate strategic implications: organisations that are making long-term research partnerships, knowledge-sharing arrangements, or technology licensing decisions in quantum-adjacent fields should be conducting appropriate due diligence on the security implications, not just the commercial ones. The 'harvest now, decrypt later' threat from state actors means that classified or commercially sensitive quantum research being conducted today could be compromised in ways that only become apparent years from now.

Quantinuum Breaks Fault-Tolerance Record; Quantum Networks Reveal Hidden Complexity in Physics

Quantinuum researchers Shival Dasu and Ben Criger published new work this week demonstrating a significant improvement in fault-tolerant quantum gate implementation. Their technique uses recursively defined error-detection circuits, called flag circuits, to identify and correct logical errors in quantum computations with a fault distance of four, surpassing the previous practical limit of two. In simple terms, this means that quantum computers using this technique can tolerate twice as many physical errors before a logical error occurs, a critical step towards the kind of reliable quantum computation that practical applications require.

The technique is particularly important because it achieves this improvement with a manageable increase in computational overhead, scaling linearly rather than exponentially with the precision requirements of the calculation. This matters enormously for the practical feasibility of fault-tolerant quantum computers, where the cost of error correction has historically threatened to consume most of the computational advantage that quantum systems offer in the first place.

Separately, researchers at the University of Bristol published work this week revealing unexpected complexity in the behaviour of interconnected quantum reference frames, the frameworks physicists use to describe observations in quantum systems. The work demonstrates that when multiple quantum reference frames are linked, the conservation of quantities like momentum, one of the most fundamental principles in physics, becomes surprisingly difficult to track in the way that classical physics assumes. This is fundamental physics rather than applied quantum computing, but it has implications for the theoretical foundations of quantum network design that will matter as quantum communication infrastructure is built out over the coming decade.

Strategic Implication

The Quantinuum fault-tolerance result is a genuine technical milestone in the path towards practical quantum computation. For organisations that have been waiting for a clearer signal that fault-tolerant quantum computing is approaching commercial relevance, this week's paper is a meaningful data point. The global quantum technology market is projected to approach nine billion dollars in 2026, up from 2.5 billion in 2025. Organisations that have not yet begun monitoring quantum developments in their sector risk finding themselves behind when commercial advantage becomes available. The most immediately actionable priority remains unchanged: begin your cryptographic asset inventory, understand which of your encrypted data assets need to remain secure into the 2030s, and engage your technology providers on their post-quantum migration roadmaps.

CONCLUSION

This week's edition is defined by three compounding pressures: technology advancing faster than governance, physical infrastructure failing to keep pace with digital ambition, and a geopolitical conflict that is reshaping the economics of everything from AI data centres to summer holidays.

Artificial intelligence is now inside corporate boardrooms and US spy agency policy battles simultaneously. The first confirmed case of AI being used offensively to discover a zero-day vulnerability in the wild marks the moment the threat landscape changed from theoretical to operational. The ShinyHunters breach of 275 million Canvas records and the Exim memory corruption flaw are reminders that the fundamentals of patch management and vendor oversight still matter as much as the frontier threats.

The energy picture is worsening, not stabilising. The US EIA's admission that it underestimated the supply disruption, Trump's rejection of Iran's ceasefire proposal, and oil settling higher for a third consecutive day all point to a sustained rather than transient crisis. The Georgia water scandal places a new lens on the AI infrastructure build-out: it is not enough to secure power and planning permission for data centres. Water, materials, supply chains, and community relationships are all now material to the story.

Organisations that have not yet done the following should treat each as an immediate priority: apply patches for CVE-2026-45185 on any Exim deployment; verify Canvas data breach exposure and assess GDPR notification obligations; update energy cost assumptions to reflect a sustained disruption scenario; begin cryptographic asset inventories for post-quantum migration; and assess whether your AI governance documentation covers the agentic AI systems that are already in production. The organisations building governance capacity ahead of regulatory obligation are not merely managing risk. They are building competitive advantage.

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Date of Publication: 13th May 2026     |     Eric Williamson, Director of Compliance and Risk, The Digital Commonwealth Limited     |     2023-2026 The Digital Commonwealth Limited   |   Suite 23, Portland House, Glacis Road GX11 1AA, Gibraltar   |   Company number: 124003

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