The satellites are owned and operated by ImageSat International N.V. (ISI), a company founded in 1997, as a Joint venture between IAI, El-Op and Core Software Technology (CST).

A joint venture was established between IAI and the American company Core Software Technology (CST) in 1997, named "West Indies Space" headquartered at Limassol, Cyprus, and incorporated in the Netherlands Antilles.

[5] The venture competed in the international markets with Lockheed Martin, which at the time was developing the Ikonos satellite, that had similar capabilities.

With the entry of a group of investors from Europe and the United States into the venture, IAI reduced its share to 31% and El-Op to 9%.

[14] On July 28, 2001, IAI officially signed an agreement with ImageSat International, to build the $110 million EROS B satellite.

[18] According to the plaintiffs, the root of the problem was joint ownership of the venture by private investors and IAI (owned by the State of Israel).

According to them, the partial ownership that the state has in the company harmed the chance of profitable contracts, due to political considerations.

The lawsuit also claimed that the only bans imposed, at the time of the company's establishment, were that it was not allowed to sell satellites images to any country within a radius of up to 1,550 miles from Israel.

In addition, he claimed that EROS B was not built according to the specifications provided by Imgesat, it was delivered three years late, and was in fact a duplicate of "Ofeq-5".

[21][22] Further legal disputes against the company included: a lawsuit by the CEO for bonus payments, allegedly owned to him for signing a deal with Angola.

[24] Additionally, the State Comptroller of Israel also published a critical audit report, in September 2005, about IAI's involvement in the program and losses incurred from it.

Among the shortcomings revealed were: that the company's plans for the sale of satellite observation services were partial and unsubstantiated, in terms of the quality of the data and the reasonableness of the assumptions on which they were based on.

And the business plan presented to the board of directors included a key marketing assumption, regarding long-term contracts, which was too optimistic.

The satellite offers an optical resolution of 70 cm (about two feet), and as of launch date plans were to use it to monitor Iran's developing nuclear program for potential threats to Israeli security.