How will the National Security and Investment Bill impact tech deals?

The UK government has published its much-anticipated National Security and Investment Bill, which creates a new stand-alone regime for it to intervene in a broad range of transactions on national security grounds.

Some key features of the Bill are:

• A wide range of deals are in scope including deals where as little as 15% of shares in a target are acquired, acquisitions of assets such as land and intellectual property rights, and acquisitions of overseas targets with a nexus to the UK
• The Bill has retrospective effect to 12 November 2020 and so could potentially impact current deals
• Once the Bill is law, mandatory notification rules will apply to deals in 17 high-risk sectors including advanced materials, robotics, AI, communications, computing hardware, cryptographic authentication, data infrastructure, quantum technologies and satellite and space technology

In this video, our experts Marc Shrimpling and Ken Wilkinson discuss the likely impact of the Bill on tech M&A and private equity and venture capital investments.