I think the station thing is on the mark. The codex says
abandoned and thats exactly what the CIEPs stations were. Natural for TDW to take them back under its auspices after the CIEPs decimation. CIEP also probably still exist, but much diminished, according to the authors comments.
Gunn's CIEP station has a fairly detailed description of its environs, but alas all system descriptions in the novels are unreliable as things changed after their final edit. The GG in the book, called there 'Middleton', does not exist anywhere under that name, again due likely to the botched implementation of the authors requests for systems in game. The cockups here are legion - some systems have swapped assets due to human error. All of this makes finding the CIEP assets extremely difficult.
The author's notes at
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threa...eel-may-contain-spoilers.402645/#post-6366667 are instructive and also give a fair view of some of the issues between FD and the authors with respects to accuracy of the in game data.
Certainly there is some attempt between the authors to drop little cross links in between books - the CIEP council being a prime example with it also having Luko on board. Would that we could identify the others, particularly The Architect , as he is likely running the CIEP show now.