On April 17, 2024, the U.S. Department of the Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”) announced that it would not renew an existing authorization for transactions related to oil and gas sector operations in Venezuela, and replaced the existing authorization with a 45-day wind-down period for previously authorized transactions, expiring May 31, 2024.  By way of background, OFAC administers sanctions targeting Venezuela that generally prohibit U.S. persons from engaging in any transactions or other dealings with or involving the Government of Venezuela (“GoV”), Petróleos de Vene ..read more

On April 24, 2024, President Biden signed into law H.R. 815, a foreign aid bill containing a provision that doubles the statute of limitations (SoL) for civil and criminal violations of U.S. sanctions and other national security programs from five years to ten years. In particular, Section 3111 of H.R. 815 amends the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and the Trading With the Enemy Act (TWEA)—the two authorizing statutes underpinning virtually all modern U.S. sanctions—to add a ten-year SoL for civil and criminal proceedings, overriding the default five-year periods set forth ..read more

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on 12 April 2024 became subject to certain restrictions, including that post-12-April warrants cannot be cancelled or withdrawn by a UK person, or anyone located in the UK, in order ..read more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