The Treasury Department is seeking public comments on an information collection involving the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S.’s expanded jurisdiction under the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act of 2018. FIRRMA expanded CFIUS jurisdiction to allow it to review certain non-controlling foreign investments, certain real estate transactions involving foreign parties and more. Comments on the collection are due by Dec. 27.
The Commerce Department is accepting nominations for its Advisory Committee on Supply Chain Competitiveness, it said. Commerce "seeks members who, by virtue of their current roles and past experience, bring a track record of effective senior executive leadership on issues impacting the U.S. and global supply chains," the agency said. Applications will be accepted until Dec. 8. Commerce is seeking members for the current two-year term, which ends Nov. 9, 2023.
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The U.S. needs to abandon the current model of multilateral export control regimes and move toward control agreements with smaller groups of allies in specific technology areas, said Liza Tobin, the National Security Council’s former China director. Tobin, speaking during an Emerging Technology Technical Advisory Committee meeting last week, also said the U.S. should look to impose technology-specific controls on items destined to China rather than end-use- and end-user-based controls, which are proving increasingly ineffective.
Zendesk, a U.S.-based software-as-a-service provider, said it received U.S. approval regarding its acquisition by an investor group led by investment firms Permira in the U.K. and Hellman & Friedman, headquartered in California. The company had submitted a voluntary notice to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. and received “written notice” from CFIUS Nov. 17 that it “had concluded its review and cleared the transaction,” Zendesk said in a Nov. 17 SEC filing. The company expects the acquisition to be completed Nov. 22.
Two top Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee urged the Biden administration to craft a specific strategy to address the “new era of geostrategic and geoeconomic competition with China.” In a Nov. 17 letter to the White House, Sens. Jim Risch, R-Idaho, and Mitt Romney, R-Utah, said the U.S. needs a “comprehensive strategy” to address China’s human rights violations in Hong Kong, its expanding military presence in the South China Sea and its “predatory economic practices.”
The Bureau of Industry and Security’s new Unverified List policies, which allow the agency to move a company from the UVL to the Entity List if it can’t complete an end-use check within 60 days, likely will lead to an uptick in companies added to the Entity List, said Nazak Nikahtar, former acting BIS undersecretary. Nikakhtar said she believes many Chinese companies added to the UVL won’t participate in an end-use check that meets the U.S.’s standards.
The U.K. this week ordered a subsidiary of China’s Wingtech Technology to divest from Britain's largest microchip facility, Nexperia Newport (formerly Newport Wafer Lab), several months after U.S. lawmakers urged the Biden administration to intervene in the acquisition. The U.K.’s Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy’s decision will force Wingtech’s subsidiary, Netherlands-based Nexperia, to sell at least 86% of its stake in Nexperia Newport “within a specified period and by following a specified process.” Nexperia acquired the stake in then Newport Wafer Lab in 2021.
World Trade Organization members agreed during the Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) Committee Nov. 9-11 meeting "on the process for undertaking the work programme" to address challenges on the implementation of the Agreement on the Application of SPS Measures, the WTO said. The member countries committed to working together on assessing the impact of emerging challenges and trade concerns in applying the agreement. Challenges included population growth, climate change, new technologies, innovation, and pest and disease pressures. In June, WTO members adopted the SPS Ministerial Declaration, which mandated the establishment of the work program and reporting of the program's findings at the 13th Ministerial Conference, set to be held some time between December and March.
Days after President Joe Biden said the U.S. may investigate billionaire Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter for national security reasons, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said she sees “no basis” for doing so, CBS reported Nov. 15. Yellen told CBS that she wasn’t “sure precisely what [the president] had in mind, but we are -- we have really no basis -- to the best of my knowledge -- to examine his finances of his company. I'm not aware of concerns that would cause us” to investigate. Yellen’s comments came less than a month after Bloomberg reported that the administration was weighing whether it should subject the deal to a review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (see 2210210018).