Nicholas O'Keefe Assesses Foreign Investor Response to 'Golden Shares'

Foley & Lardner LLP partner Nicholas O’Keefe assessed the Trump administration’s taking of equity stakes in private companies in fDi Intelligence, a Financial Times publication.

Commenting on how the U.S. government’s intervention in several key industries — mining and critical minerals, semiconductors, and steel among them — is being received by investors, O’Keefe shared that some foreign firms have raised concerns regarding clearance by the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which assesses certain transactions involving foreign investment from a national security perspective.

“They want to know whether CFIUS is now more of an arbitrary process,” O’Keefe said, as well as if the government “may seek to extract” a golden share.