Our popular Annual Compliance Conference, which attracts over 6,000 in-house senior legal and compliance professionals from across the world, will be held across five weeks from 5 September – 5 October 2023.We will be virtually delivering our cutting-edge insights and guidance on key global compliance, investigations and ethics issues. We invite you to join us to gain practical insights and analysis on significant developments across:• anti-bribery, corruption and economic crime• customs and FTAs• ESG, supply…
Elena Roca Umbert, Laura González and Valeria Enrich The Spanish government has modified, once again and with immediate effect from 28 December 2022, Spanish foreign direct investment (“FDI”) rules that were introduced in March 2020 in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic. The changes that have been introduced are twofold:1. The first change is the extension until 31 December 2024 of the suspension of the liberalisation regime of foreign direct investment by residents of EU or…
On 2 September 2022, the European Commission published its second report on FDI screening, and the first one to cover an entire calendar year following the commencement of the EU FDI Screening Regulation in October 2020 (see our previous posts here and here). Since then, the Commission notes that it has screened over 740 transactions under its FDI mechanism and found that the “vast majority” of transactions did not pose a problem from a security…
On 16 June 2022, the UK Government published its first Annual Report (the “Report”) pursuant to the National Security and Investment Act 2021 (the “NSI Act”), along with a Memorandum of Understanding (“MoU”) between the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (“BEIS”) and the Competition and Markets Authority (the “CMA”) on the operation of the NSI Act. NSI Act Annual Report The Report provides a summary of the functioning of the UK’s new foreign…
On 4 January 2022, the new UK foreign investment review regime under the National Security and Investment Act (“NSI Act”) came into force, completing the overhaul of the UK’s foreign investment rules and commencing operation of a standalone foreign investment screening regime for the first time in the UK. The new rules require businesses and investors to submit mandatory notifications for certain acquisitions of and investments in companies active in 17 key sectors of the…
In the second episode of its podcast series, Baker McKenzie discusses recent developments in foreign direct investment restrictions in the UK. Produced in partnership with Concurrences, a leading antitrust publication, our foreign investment experts Samantha Mobley and Sunny Mann discuss these developments with Sarah Mackintosh, Deputy Director, National Security and Investment, BEIS, London. To access this podcast, and our previous episode focusing on Germany, click here.
On 30 December 2020, the EU and China reached an agreement “in principle” for a new EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (“CAI”) (see our previous update here). The CAI concludes seven years of investment negotiations, that begun in October 2013, and is expected to come into force later this year. In its press release (see here), the EU stated that the CAI was the “most ambitious agreement that China has ever concluded with a third…