Insights

Washington – January 26, 2022: Crowell & Moring’s International Trade Group has been named a Practice Group of the Year for 2021 by Law360. This marks the fourth year the group has been recognized by the publication with this distinction.

On April 11, 2024, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (“CFIUS” or the “Committee”) announced proposed amendments to its enforcement and mitigation regulations, marking the first substantive update to CFIUS’s mitigation and enforcement provisions since the enactment of the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act of 2018.  The Committee issued a notice of proposed rulemaking ("NPRM”) that would modify the regulations that apply to certain investments and acquisitions, as well as real estate transactions, by foreign persons as follows:

The Outbound Investment Program will be implemented through regulations issued by Treasury that will require notification for, or will otherwise prohibit U.S. persons from undertaking, certain transactions involving “covered national security products or technologies” and entities connected to a “country of concern.” Accordingly – concurrent with the Executive Order – Treasury released an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that provides some potential definitions of these terms, but the exact definitions and the details of the regulations will be developed through public notice and comment that concludes on September 28, 2023. Treasury also published a Fact Sheet that provides additional information on the proposed details and scope of the outbound investment prohibitions and notification requirements, which will likely not be finalized until 2024 sometime after Treasury has published draft regulations and gathered another round of public comments.

On October 20, 2022, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS) adopted long-awaited CFIUS Enforcement and Penalty Guidelines (the “Guidelines”) identifying how it will review and consider three categories of non-compliances that may be subject to penalties:

Crowell & Moring LLP's International Trade Group was featured in a WorldECR special report examining the importance of Washington, D.C. in the U.S. and international export controls and sanctions landscape. The report talked with Crowell & Moring attorneys and other leading lawyers about the impact of U.S. Export Control Reform on real-life business, U.S. sanctions policy and practice, and other issues. WorldECR is the journal of export controls and sanctions.

Meeting U.S. customs law requirements can be challenging, time-consuming, and very costly for importers if not done right. Non-compliance with customs laws can result in civil and criminal penalties, denial of entry, seizure and destruction of goods. It is imperative for importers to have a solid protocol for applying the critical rules on a day-to-day basis.

Please click here for a copy of the presentation. As we discussed in our first This Year in Trade webinar earlier this year, as globalization pushes forward, the potential rewards – from trade, from expansion, from partnerships – have multiplied along with the risks. As a result, companies doing business around the world are facing a variety of important issues affecting their bottom line, including sanctions, export controls, customs, and many others. On Thursday, October 8, 2015 at 12:00 pm Eastern, our Crowell & Moring team will follow up on our February 2015 predictions of the key trade issues to watch globally for 2015 and into 2016.