At a time when the U.S. government is tightly monitoring, and even rejecting, foreign investment transactions, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer has recruited a former top official of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States as a partner in Washington, D.C.

Aimen Mir will lead a CFIUS practice for the Magic Circle firm. Mir was until May 2018 deputy assistant secretary for investment security at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, where he was one of the few key CFIUS officials reviewing and approving foreign investment transactions. CFIUS is an interagency committee responsible for screening deals involving foreign investment into the U.S. for national security implications.

Before his appointment as deputy assistant treasury secretary in 2014, Mir was CFIUS staff chairman, the committee's main point of contact for filings, for five years. During his tenure at CFIUS, Mir helped review and manage depositions of more than 1,000 transactions and worked on major overhauls of the CFIUS review process, including the legislative process of the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act (FIRRMA) in 2017-18.

Earlier in his career, Mir practised with Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr for seven years.

Under FIRRMA, CFIUS has required mandatory filings in specific industries involving critical U.S. technologies and expanded the scope of its investigations to include minority investment transactions in those industries. The committee has particularly tightened scrutiny toward investments from China; since President Donald Trump took office, at least 18 investment deals from China have failed the CFIUS review.

"Aimen is the most significant hire to come out of CFIUS, and we are proud to call him our partner," Peter Lyons, Freshfields' New York-based U.S. managing partner, said in a statement.

In addition to his CFIUS role, Freshfields also said Mir had served as the principal U.S. liaison to other foreign investment regulators, and that gave him a unique insight into foreign investment regimes around the world. Countries outside of the U.S. such as the U.K., Germany, France and other member states of the European Union are also strengthening their investment-screening regimes.

Mir's arrival came after the announcement of longtime antitrust veteran John Davies' retirement from Freshfields; Davies will join public affairs firm Brunswick Group as a senior adviser. In Washington, D.C., the firm also recently lost former CFIUS lawyer and special counsel Shawn Cooley, who is now a partner at Kirkland & Ellis.

In addition to Mir, Freshfields made several partner hires in Washington, D.C. from the U.S. Department of Justice in 2018, including the former director of litigation for the antitrust division, Eric Mahr, and Mahr's former counsellor, Andrew Ewalt.

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