You own the company. But who controls it?

Ownership and control are not the same thing.

You hold the equity. You make the decisions.

But the infrastructure your business depends on — the chips, cloud, code, and contracts — answers to someone else's terms.

A vendor can throttle your capacity.

A jurisdiction can restrict your hardware.

A licensing change can rewrite your costs overnight.

None of these appear on your cap table.

But each can have a say in whether your business keeps running.

For European SMEs, this dependency stack is where operational risk can hide.

So real sovereignty means looking beneath the ownership structure and asking:

Who can actually say no?

Because control isn't exercised through the shareholder register.

It's exercised through the supply chain.

How many businesses actually know who has the power to interrupt their operations?