US Congress hurries to approve bill tightening scrutiny of offshore deals
Lawmakers are pushing for a hearing on the legislation this year and a vote in both chambers by next January, an expert told the South China Morning Post
The US Congress is moving quickly to approve proposed bipartisan legislation that would tighten national security reviews of foreign investment, particularly Chinese acquisitions of US assets, by pushing for a hearing on the bill this year and a vote in both chambers by next January, an expert with direct knowledge of the bill told the South China Morning Post.
Derek Scissors, a China analyst at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute think tank, said on Tuesday that there would be few reasons for a fast-moving Congress to block the proposed legislation introduced last week. Scissors began working on the bill with Congress as an outside consultant in March 2016, while Barack Obama was still US president.
The bill’s proposed text does not name China as its main target, although its author, John Cornyn, a Republican Senator from Texas and the Senate Majority Whip, accused China in a release when he unveiled the legislation of “exploiting gaps” in the existing review process to degrade the US’s military technological edge by acquiring and investing in US companies.
“Treasury does not want to name specific countries and they want as much flexibility as possible,” Scissors told a Heritage Foundation event in Washington. “They don’t want direct confrontations with the Chinese.”
The bill, called the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernisation Act, won Democrats’ support in both the Senate and House last Wednesday.
It would expand foreign investment review procedures overseen by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which is chaired by the Treasury Secretary along with eight other heads of government agencies, including defence and homeland security.
