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Grace Kim

Grace Kim is an associate in Covington’s London office and a member of the Antitrust/Competition and White Collar and Investigations practices. She assists clients across a range of industries on regulatory matters, investigations and transactions requiring competition and anti-corruption/bribery review. Grace also advises on the UK’s National Security and Investment Act and other Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) regimes, and is a member of the firm’s Business and Human Rights practice group.

Prior to joining the firm as a trainee, Grace held in-house compliance roles at the European headquarters of a global consumer electronics company and the global headquarters of a UK-based retailer.

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Over the summer, the UK Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (“BEIS”) delivered the first decisions, in the form of final orders, under the National Security and Investment Act 2021 (“NSIA”).  We consider these decisions and other cases in the context of the first nine months of the UK’s new (quasi) Foreign Direct Investment (“FDI”) regime.

Key takeaways:

  • The NSIA has broad reach, and BEIS has shown willingness to exercise the powers to review transactions that can stretch beyond mergers and acquisitions, for example, to licensing agreements.
  • NSIA review involves the weighing of a number of factors relating to the target, the acquirer and the level of control being obtained.  Early decisions suggest that target’s products/services and activities are just as important a factor as the acquirer’s identity, among the cases that have engaged the attention of the Investment Security Unit (“ISU”).
  • “Behavioural” undertakings, e.g. involving implementation of security controls or granting of audit rights to regulators appear to be a continuation of trends seen in the predecessor UK ‘public interest’ regime, and similar to other EU FDI procedures.

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Continue Reading UK FDI: Decision-making practice emerging under the National Security and Investment Act

On 28 April 2022, the Subsidy Control Bill (the “Bill”) received Royal Assent, becoming the Subsidy Control Act 2022 (the “Act”).  The Act lays the basic framework for the new UK-wide subsidy control regime, which is now expected to come into force in Autumn 2022.  Although the Act primarily addresses UK public authorities and their…

As we now enter the third week of lockdown in the UK, this blog post rounds-up the steps that the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and certain other regulators have taken to address the unprecedented challenges facing the country.  This includes targeted relaxation of certain elements of the rules to facilitate essential forms of

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