Biden administration delays Chinese military investment ban
Move by US Treasury will give new president more time to review Donald Trump’s China policies
The US Treasury has delayed the implementation of a ban on Americans investing in companies with suspected ties to the Chinese military, which had been imposed by Donald Trump after he lost the presidential election.
Mr Trump in November issued an executive order that barred Americans from investing in Chinese companies included in a Pentagon blacklist of groups that might threaten US security. The Trump administration set a January 28 deadline for the ban to take effect, but the Biden administration on Wednesday said that it would extend the date to May 27.
The move comes as the new administration starts reviewing actions that Mr Trump took against China, including putting dozens of Chinese companies on Pentagon and commerce department blacklists that ban investments in those groups or make it harder to export technology to them.
The Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, or Ofac, granted the extension by issuing what it calls a “general licence”. The Trump administration earlier this month had issued a licence that pushed the deadline from January 11 into the second week of the Biden administration.
John Smith, a former Ofac head, said the Trump team had also created confusion because the ban applied to companies with the same name as the groups on the Ofac list — which was derived from the Pentagon list — and companies with “closely” matching names.
The language, which was not accompanied by any clear guidance, meant financial institutions faced the task of having to sift through hundreds and possibly thousands of companies that could be possible sanctions targets.
“Industry very quickly made it clear to Ofac and the US government that the situation was unworkable,” said Mr Smith, a partner at Morrison & Foerster.
“Instead of admitting that it had adopted an unworkable standard, the Trump administration issued a general licence to provide a break for a couple of weeks that would stick it to the Biden administration, which would have to clean up the mess.”
Daniel Tannebaum, a former Treasury official, said the extension would give the Biden team time to assess the policy and to remove some of the confusion that arose during the final weeks of the Trump administration.
“It gives the new administration time to potentially clean up an action that created significant market confusion. General licences are a common method of tweaking sanctions programmes after their implementation to manage against initial unanticipated consequences,” said Mr Tannebaum, a sanctions expert and partner at Oliver Wyman.
Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, this week said the new Biden administration was conducting a series of “complex reviews” of Mr Trump’s China-related policies, but would proceed with “an approach of patience”, suggesting it would take time before the new team decided which measures would be kept and which would be amended or reversed.
“That means we’re going to have consultations with our allies, we’re going to have consultations with Democrats and Republicans, and we’re going to allow the inter-agency process to work its way through to review and assess how we should move forward with our relationship,” Ms Psaki said.
Roger Robinson, a former NSC official who argues that the US should take more aggressive action to prevent American investors from being able to invest in Chinese companies, said he hoped the new administration realised what was at stake during its review.
“Hopefully, the new administration appreciates the need to preserve capital markets sanctions as a key part of their toolkit for dealing with Chinese corporate national security and human rights abusers and protecting American retail investors,” said Mr Robinson, who runs RWR Advisory Group, a research and risk consultancy.
https://www.ft.com/content/d4af927a-8800-4d2d-8b52-2e71339e8827