After its opening all-day Foreign Investment Treaties conference (reported in USCIB’s International Business Weekly report last week) on “level-playing fields” in Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), the OECD committee devoted a full-day of its meeting last week to a wide-ranging discussion of increasing reliance on “national security” factors in reviews of inward FDI flows by many OECD member and other governments.

“Business at OECD” representatives were  active participants in all those discussions, with USCIB Vice President for Investment Policy Shaun Donnelly among the business speakers.  David Fagan, a partner in USCIB member firm Covington and Burling’s Washington office and a leading FDI/investment security lawyer, was a featured expert speaker during the discussion where the U.S. Government’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. or “CFIUS” and the recently enacted Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act  (“FIRRMA”) of 2017 were much-discussed.

“David did a great job of explaining recent development in US policy on reviewing FDI,” according to Donnelly. “Our Business at OECD team was able to get across our key messages on the importance of closely delineating national security investment reviews around the world to specific, legitimate security issues and avoiding opening the door to abuse of “national security” provisions for blatantly projectionist discrimination against foreign investors around the world.”