Kwasi Kwarteng, the UK business secretary, will be warned in a Whitehall report that allowing the sale of a Welsh semiconductor company to a Chinese buyer would undermine one of the country’s strategic industries.
Kwarteng has until the end of June to make a final decision on last year’s purchase of Newport Wafer Fab — the UK’s largest semiconductor manufacturing plant — by Nexperia, a Dutch subsidiary of the Chinese tech company Wingtech.
In March, the government’s national security adviser, Stephen Lovegrove, concluded in a probe, retrospectively ordered by prime minister Boris Johnson, that there were insufficient reasons to block the deal on specific security grounds given the company’s outdated technology.