The Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. should review all U.S. investment transactions by Brazilian meatpacking conglomerate JBS S.A., its holding company J&F Investimentos and any entity owned by the company’s owners Wesley and Joesley Batista, two senators said. The companies use “criminal practices to obtain the funds to acquire U.S. companies,” which may jeopardize U.S. economic security and undermine U.S. efforts to combat corruption, Sens. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said in an Aug. 13 letter to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. “With JBS S.A. planning further U.S. acquisitions in the near future,” the senators said, “the need for a thorough investigation is urgent.”
Several companies recently disclosed their filings with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. or updated the status of their ongoing CFIUS reviews. Transactions involve Chinese technology companies, an agricultural technology business and a workplace learning technology provider.
Export Compliance Daily is providing readers with the top stories for Aug. 2-6 in case you missed them. You can find any article by searching the title or by clicking on the hyperlinked reference number.
The U.S. needs to expand export and investment restrictions to prevent China from acquiring advanced semiconductor equipment and other sensitive technologies, former national security officials told Congress this week. One official specifically said the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security should impose export controls more actively. Another said the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. needs more resources.
Export Compliance Daily is providing readers with the top stories for July 26-30 in case you missed them. You can find any article by searching the title or by clicking on the hyperlinked reference number.
Measures this year by the United Kingdom, Germany and Canada to boost their foreign investment screening regimes will likely improve their standing with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. and could catapult Germany into CFIUS’s group of excepted foreign states, observers said. Although Germany could become an excepted state, each country has tightened its screening tools to further scrutinize certain foreign direct investments, which will likely lead to more investment hurdles for their respective industries.
The Biden administration should expand the Bureau of Industry and Security, establish a clear definition for critical technologies and improve information sharing to boost corporate due diligence as part of a national technology strategy, national security experts said. BIS specifically has a larger role to play to protect the U.S. technology supply chain, which should extend beyond just export controls, the Center for a New American Security said in a July 29 report.
The House’s Republican Study Committee released a counterproposal to the Senate’s Endless Frontier Act that would call for a host of new sanctions against China, continue U.S. export control authorities and make some changes to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. The committee’s Countering Communist China Act, released July 29, calls for broad U.S. sanctions actions, including designations against Chinese technology applications, various senior government officials, foreign people that steal U.S. intellectual property and “foreign persons that knowingly spread malign disinformation … for purposes of political warfare.” The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control would also be authorized to hire 10 new employees to “carry out activities of the Office associated with the People’s Republic of China.”
The Treasury Department released its annual report to Congress for fiscal year 2020 on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., outlining CFIUS statistics, key judgments and an overview of transactions reviewed by the committee. Unlike previous annual reports, the FY20 version includes statistics on declarations required for transactions involving critical technologies. The report includes numbers on the declarations made under the requirements, which took effect in October but applied to transactions after Feb. 13, 2020 (see 2009140041), and the pilot program that preceded the requirements.
The U.S. should expand certain foreign investment reporting requirements and establish a list of trusted partner countries that are exempt from investment screening disclosures, the House Armed Services Committee said last week. The committee presented the comments in a July 22 report from its bipartisan Defense Critical Supply Chain Task Force, which said the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. can be used more efficiently to help make critical defense supply chains more secure.