When a European defence programme admits a company whose ultimate owner sits outside Europe, something is usually recorded in that company’s internal files as a clearance. The board is told the group has been assessed and found eligible. The finance function treats the finding as an asset with a shelf life. Counterparties are shown it in diligence. Lenders price against it. And in almost every case the document records something far narrower than what is being relied upon: a determination about one legal entity, in one role, for one action, under one instrument, on one date, subject to a continuing duty of disclosure whose discharge nobody outside the granting service can observe. The gap between what was decided and what is believed to have been decided is where the commercial risk in European defence-industrial finance now sits, and it is widening, because the Union has been adding instruments faster than it has been harmonising them. Four of them are operating simultaneously, each with its own eligibility architecture, its own vocabulary for the same corporate facts, and its own answer to the question of whether anything decided elsewhere counts. The question worth asking is therefore not whether a firm is European. It is what a European determination actually establishes, how far it reaches, how long it lasts, and what happens at every joint where one instrument hands a company to the next.