Updated Orrick Guide to Foreign Investment Reviews

Orrick has updated its Guide to Foreign Investment Reviews available here. To assist dealmakers, the Guide provides concise information about restraints on foreign direct investment (“FDI”) by China, the European Union, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Following the lead of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (“CFIUS”), more and more nations and country groups are examining and sometimes limiting foreign investment principally for national security reasons. As has been the case with the United States and CFIUS, policymakers have provided investment-screening bodies more authority, and those bodies have become increasingly aggressive in scrutinizing foreign investment transactions.

In addition to expansion of legal authority and screening vigor, a variety of trends are evident:

• Screening authorities have intensified their focus on sectors apart from defense and intelligence, including advanced technology industries such as microelectronics, healthcare and biotechnology.
• Screening authorities are increasingly concerned about investments by state-owned or state-controlled companies.
• National security-related FDI screening is moving beyond the United States and its allies to countries such as China.

The new iteration of Orrick’s Guide to Foreign Investment Reviews accounts for major recent policy developments in, for example, the United Kingdom, which broadly overhauled its FDI screening mechanism within the last month.

For Questions or Comments