On 13 July 2023, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) handed down its first ruling on the European Union Foreign Direct Investment Screening Regulation, which entered into force in October 2020. In short, the...more
The European Union’s new screening tool for third-country subsidies introduces a novel form of mergers & acquisitions scrutiny. Companies worldwide need to account for timing and execution risks arising from this system when...more
On 23 June 2023, the European Commission adopted its 11th package of sanctions targeting Russia and Belarus. The new package focuses on tackling the circumvention of trade sanctions through third countries and increasing the...more
On 4 May 2023, the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced the launch of an initial review of the market for artificial intelligence foundation models. Through this initial review, the CMA aims to...more
The UK government recently published its second edition of Market Guidance Notes on the National Security and Investment (NSI) regime, which includes new additions and amendments to the previously published guidance of 19...more
On 30 March 2023, HM Treasury and the Home Office published the Economic Crime Plan 2 for 2023 to 2026. The three-year plan builds on the first Economic Crime Plan published in 2019 and commits the UK government to:...more
We finally have sight of the long-awaited Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill. Warning: It is a sizeable and ambitious piece of legislation, but the following is our summary take on the key competition and...more
The European Union’s top court recently confirmed that an M&A transaction that does not require mandatory pre-merger authorization may be investigated post-merger on suspicion that the transaction involved an ‘abuse’ of the...more
Following the US Department of Justice’s first criminal conviction for labor market antitrust violations in October 2022, and with scrutiny of labor agreements increasing internationally, the UK Competition and Markets...more
On 10 November 2022, the UK’s Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation (OFSI) published its 2021 – 2022 Annual Review. In this alert, we’ve summarised its main takeaways. The publication of the Annual Review comes at a...more
More than 11 months have passed since the UK’s National Security and Investment Act 2021 (NSI Act) came into force, creating a stand-alone foreign direct investment review system in the UK for transactions in specified...more
The Department of Justice (DOJ) Antitrust Division secured its first win in a criminal enforcement of labor market antitrust violations on October 27, 2022, when nurse staffing company VDA OC pleaded guilty to violating...more
On 27 September 2022, the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation (OFSI) announced that it had imposed a £30,000 penalty against a UK registered company for contravention of the Ukraine (European Union Financial...more
On 8 August 2022, the UK’s Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) unanimously set aside a £17.9 million fine imposed on the Compare The Market website (CTM) by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). The CAT held that the CMA...more
In May 2020, we published a blog post about the US-UK Data Access Agreement, a first-of-its-kind reciprocal agreement between the US and the UK. Under the agreement, law enforcement agencies in either country could obtain...more
On July 19, 2022, the UK government published its long-awaited Market Guidance Notes on the National Security and Investment (NSI) Act, based on an analysis of notifications received to date and feedback from stakeholders....more
On June 16, 2022, the UK government published its first annual report on the operation of the UK’s National Security and Investment (NSI) regime, covering the first three months since the regime came into force on January 4,...more
On 3 June 2022, the European Council finally adopted the sixth set of economic and individual sanctions targeting Russia and Belarus. The new measures, which came after weeks of member state negotiations, focus on oil imports...more
On April 20, 2022, the UK government announced wide-ranging reforms to UK competition and consumer law policy, including significant threshold changes to the UK merger control regime. In particular, while the government aims...more