(From Reuters)
China led the countries whose planned U.S. acquisitions and investments for 2014 were probed for U.S. security implications, making it the most scrutinized country by U.S. regulators, according to a government report released on Friday.
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), an interagency panel that reviews deals from a national security perspective, said in its annual report that it investigated 51 of all 147 international deals filed with the agency in 2014.
For the third year in a row, CFIUS looked at more deals involving investors from China than from anywhere else. In 2014, CFIUS probed 24 Chinese investments in the United States, compared to 21 involving investors from the United Kingdom and 15 from Canada.
So far this year there have been 22 mergers and acquisitions announced in the United States involving Chinese purchasers, totaling $23 billion, according to Thomson Reuters data. That outpaces Chinese outbound U.S. mergers and acquisitions for all of 2015, which reached $13 billion.
Not only is investment from China increasing, but it is flowing to electronics, which can have implications for U.S. national security, said Christopher Brewster, a CFIUS expert with Stroock & Stroock & Lavan LLP. Read more