On April 12, 2024  the United States, in coordination with the United Kingdom, issued new prohibitions with  respect to Russian aluminium, copper and nickel. The new actions prohibit the import of Russian-origin aluminum, copper and nickel into the United States and limit their use on global metal exchanges and in over-the-counter derivatives trading. In the UK, metals not on warrant before/at 23:59 on 12 April 2024 became subject to certain restrictions, including that post-12-April warrants cannot be cancelled or withdrawn by a UK person, or anyone located in the UK, in order ..read more

On April 11, the U.S. Department of the Treasury (“Treasury”), as Chair of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (“CFIUS”), issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (the “Proposed Rule”) that would modify and expand CFIUS’s mitigation and enforcement authority.  For background, in October 2022, Treasury released its first-ever CFIUS Enforcement and Penalty Guidelines (see our prior update here), and the Proposed Rule represents a continued evolution of CFIUS’s approach to monitoring, compliance, and enforcement. The Proposed Rule would enhance CFIUS’s authority in the fol ..read more

The European Commission proposes a revised EU FDI Screening Regulation EU takes time to ready Outbound Investment Control Toolkit German FDI reviews dropped in 2023, but FDI review activity follows the trends of prior years Italian FDI reviews in 2023 remained consistently high, despite the end of the extraordinary provisions enacted in connection with the Covid-19 outbreak UK: NSIA decisions, Telegraph Media Group public interest review, and new legislation prohibiting foreign state ownership of newspapers In the U.S., updates to the Critical and Emerging Technologies list signal refinement ..read more

Cleary Gottlieb partner Chase Kaniecki and associates Samuel Chang, William Dawley, and B.J. Altvater co-authored the United States chapter in Lexology Panoramic: Foreign Investment Review 2024. To read the chapter, click here ..read more

The U.S. National Science and Technology Council (NSTC)[1] recently published an updated list of critical and emerging technologies (CETs) as part of an ongoing effort to identify advanced technologies that are potentially significant to U.S. national security.  We previously summarized the February 2022 list of CETs from the NSTC here. The updated list covers the following CETs: Advanced Computing Advanced Engineering Materials Advanced Gas Turbine Engine Technologies Advanced and Networked Sensing and Signature Management Advanced Manufacturing Artificial Intelligence Biotechnologies C ..read more

The German FDI authority, the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (“BMWK”), has published the German FDI screening statistics for 2023.[1] In 2023, the BMWK reviewed a total of 537 transactions of which 257 were national FDI reviews and 280 related to transactions notified by other EU Member States to the BMWK under the EU FDI Screening Regulation and in relation to which no national FDI filings were submitted. Therefore, the number of national FDI reviews dropped from 306 filings in 2022 to 257 filings in 2023, which represents a decrease of 16%. At the same time, transac ..read more

As the second anniversary of the conflict in Ukraine approaches, the United States, the European Union, and the United Kingdom continue to focus on and tighten sanctions against Russia, with a particular emphasis on preventing circumvention and evasion of sanctions.  For example, 2023 ended with several significant regulatory developments, including the EU 12th package of sanctions against Russia, discussed in our earlier alert, and new U.S. sanctions-related authority targeting foreign financial institutions (“FFIs”) supporting Russia’s military-industrial base.  This update focuses ..read more

The English court took a mixed approach to judicial intervention in a number of cross-jurisdictional cases last year, although some further (welcome) clarity has recently been provided by the Court of Appeal. Perhaps the most salient and recent example of this has been the Court’s perceived willingness to grant Anti-Suit Injunctions (“ASIs”) to restrain foreign proceedings brought in breach of a foreign-seated arbitration clause. These recent cases have largely arisen following Russia’s 2020 amendment to Article 248 of the Arbitrazh (Commercial) Procedure Code (“2020 Amendment”), which itself ..read more

On February 1, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit unanimously granted a preliminary injunction in Shen v. Simpson, enjoining enforcement of a Florida law regulating foreign ownership of U.S. land.  That law prohibits citizens of the People’s Republic of China who are not lawful permanent residents of the United States from purchasing certain real property in Florida.  The Eleventh Circuit’s ruling enjoined enforcement of the law against two individual plaintiffs, and the court held that those plaintiffs had shown a “substantial likelihood of success” on their ..read more

On January 24, 2024, the European Commission (“EC”) adopted five initiatives as part of the European Economic Security Strategy unveiled in June 2023.[1]  The initiatives are aimed at bolstering the EU’s economic security interests.  Their main focus is a proposal for a new EU FDI Screening Regulation aimed at inbound investments.[2]  But the package also includes a white paper on outbound investment control (the “White Paper”),[3] launching a debate on whether and how to scrutinize investment outflows from the EU for the first time in the Union’s history. Filling the Gaps in th ..read more