Work Area: Foreign investment control

The UK’s foreign investment review regime has presented an additional hurdle for companies that run into financial difficulties and must navigate distress situations, several local lawyers have said.

16 February 2023

The US foreign investment review body has exempted New Zealand and UK investors from its jurisdiction to review deals for certain minority investments and mandatory filing requirements.

13 February 2023

The UK government’s decision to move national security and investment policy into the Cabinet Office could give greater weight and oversight to foreign investment reviews, local lawyers say.

10 February 2023

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States does not plan to probe Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, which was partly funded by foreign investors, despite calls from the country’s executive and legislative branches to do so.

08 February 2023

The European Commission has released draft guidance laying out how it will enforce new rules to curb anticompetitive subsidies from governments outside the bloc.

06 February 2023

An opposition politician in Canada has said proposed amendments to the country’s foreign investment law do not go far enough and criticised the government for allowing China to buy up critical assets over the past eight years.

06 February 2023

A bipartisan and bicameral bill has intensified calls to add the US agriculture secretary as a standing member of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States after the body failed to intervene in the sale of sensitive land in North Dakota to a Chinese company.

01 February 2023

The UK government has refused to retroactively review the acquisition of a semiconductor company by a Chinese investment group following a request by a senior politician, prompting lawyers to question the consistency of the regime’s scrutiny of such deals.

26 January 2023

The head of the UK parliament’s foreign affairs select committee has called for a retroactive national security review into the completed sale of a domestic semiconductor start-up to a Chinese special-purpose vehicle.

12 January 2023

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the US has issued an interim order temporarily blocking a Sino Biopharm subsidiary’s $161 million acquisition of a biopharmaceutical company.

05 January 2023