Paramount's FCC filing dated last week put the merged Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery foreign-ownership figure at 49.5 percent, with roughly 38.5 percent of the combined equity held by three Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds: Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund at 15.1 percent, the UAE's L'Imad at 12.8 percent, and the Qatar Investment Authority at 10.6 percent. [1] [2]

The paper's Paramount-WBD $110 billion deal enters its regulatory phase recorded the WBD shareholder vote, the SDNY private antitrust suit, and the DOJ's "absolutely not fast-track" stance. The filing escalates that frame. FCC rules cap foreign broadcast ownership at 25 percent; the Paramount petition asks the Commission to authorize roughly double the cap and grant a 100 percent waiver for unidentified future foreign investments. Douglas Farrar's X post sharpened the contradiction in one sentence: the administration that forced ByteDance to divest TikTok is about to hand CBS's parent to Gulf sovereigns. [3]

FCC Chair Brendan Carr called the deal "cleaner" than Netflix's earlier transaction; Senators Elizabeth Warren and Maria Cantwell have called for review of the foreign-stake structure. The public-comment window runs through May 27; reply comments through June 11. [1] What the filing does not contain is any prospective limit on how the Gulf bloc's voting structure interacts with CBS News editorial control. The combined company's subsidiary architecture would route the Middle East equity through non-voting tranches per the filing, but the FCC waiver request leaves that arrangement modifiable post-close.

Variety's report frames the equity stack at $24 billion combined sovereign capital. [2] The DOJ second-request review continues separately. Two regulatory tracks; one company.

-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, Los Angeles