The U.K.'s Business and Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch appointed five non-executive members of the Department for Business and Trade Board. The new members are Stephen Hill as lead non-executive director, Karina McTeague as Audit and Risk Assurance Committee chair, and Robert Leeming, Syed Kamall and Peter Fleet as non-executive directors. The appointments last for at least three years, during which they will "provide independent advice, support and scrutiny on the department’s work, to help deliver the Government’s ambitious business and trade agenda," the Department for International Trade said May 19.
The U.K. added 86 new entries to its Russia sanctions list, the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation announced. The listings cover 42 people and 44 entities linked to Russia's energy, metals, defense, transportation and financial sectors, including Oleg Romanenko, head official at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, 13 members of the Gazprom Neft board of directors and five members of the Transneft board of directors.
Members of Congress need to be mindful of what their proposals to regulate outbound investment might mean for U.S. businesses, one of the experts on a Washington International Trade Association webinar cautioned.
The leaders of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Indo-Pacific are trying to pass legislation to give the president the ability to respond to economic coercion of allies, but Chair Young Kim, R-Calif., asked witnesses at a subcommittee hearing she convened to advise what else could be done to stand up to China's economic aggression.
The U.S. and Taiwan completed five chapters of a trade agreement similar to the issues under discussion in the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, the U.S. announced late May 18.
DOJ is helping to oversee more cases before the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., particularly those involving sensitive U.S. personal data, said Matthew Olsen, the agency’s assistant attorney general for national security. He said DOJ is now “co-leading” with the Treasury Department about one-fourth of CFIUS reviews, “if not more,” a significant increase from previous years.
Mayer Brown added former DOJ attorney Adam Hickey as a partner. Hickey, previously deputy assistant attorney general in DOJ’s National Security Division, will focus on sanctions, export controls and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., among other issues, the firm said this week.
A bipartisan bill reintroduced in the House this week could require new sanctions against members of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and could declare the CCP and President Xi Jinping have “committed numerous human rights violations, including genocide.” The lawmakers didn't immediately release the bill's text, but under a version of the Stop CCP Act introduced in the last Congress, the U.S. president would be required to sanction any former or current member of China’s National Communist Party Congress along with their adult family members.
Both outbound and a new approach for the Committee for Foreign Investment in the U.S. drew attention at a recent hearing of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, and the chairman of the committee suggested that limiting investment screening to active investors, such as venture capital firms, is not enough.
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. is mitigating more investment deals and is hiring more staff to manage its increasing workload, said Paul Rosen, head of CFIUS. Rosen also said the committee is assessing more violations for breaches of mitigation agreements and is “for the first time” beginning to receive voluntary self-disclosures.