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Mathew Alderson

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Two of my firm’s Spain lawyers are in town this week and they yesterday explained to us the advantages for foreign countries to form Spain entities before going into Latin America and the Caribbean. They explained how Spain has long-standing, well-tested agreements with 19 such countries that not only provide favorable treatment, but require these 19 countries to in all respects treat Spanish companies exactly as they treat domestic companies. This privileged position for Spanish…
I’ve been suspicious the last few months that the Oregon Liquor Control Commission (OLCC) is starting to set a zero tolerance policy for marijuana rule violations. Unfortunately, the extrinsic evidence seems to be proving my suspicions. As I’ve previously written, the OLCC settlement policies seemed to shift last September. In a first for the commission, they rejected a settlement proposal that would have allowed a licensee to keep its license and pay a fine. That…
In an earlier set of posts, I discussed U.S. laws and regulations to a) restrict technology transfers from US companies to Chinese companies (see New Restrictions on High Tech Technology Transfers to China and b) to prevent Chinese companies from investing in U.S. technology companies. See New CFIUS Rules Shut Down Chinese Investment in U.S. Technology. In those posts, I noted that the new rules are not intended to limit the right of U.S. companies…
Yesterday afternoon, on January 16, 2019, the California Office of Administrative Law (“OAL) finally approved the sets of final regulations under it had been reviewing after submissions from the California Department of Public Health (“CDPH”) which regulates cannabis manufacturers, the California Department of Food and Agriculture (“CDFA”) which regulates cultivators, and the Bureau of Cannabis Control (“BCC”) which regulates distributors, retailers, event organizers, and testing laboratories. You can find the final regulations here. The…
We have spilled a lot of ink on this blog related to the 2018 Farm Bill, which legalized hemp at the federal level. It’s huge news. And there are so many ramifications, from food law to trademarks to the financial services environment. This blog post is going to cover financial institutions and hemp at about 10,000 feet. Since late December, we’ve had many clients come to us with frustrations about the ongoing lack of…
Mergermarket, a leading U.S. mergers data reporter just published its global M&A report for 2018, revealing that investments from China in U.S. businesses fell by 95% as compared to 2016. A summary of the data in the Report shows the following: 1. Worldwide M&A activity was strong in 2018. “The transactions that did make it to the signing table reached USD 3.5tn worth of activity, ranking 2018 as the third-largest year on record by…
Euler Hermes, the German credit insurance company, recently released its bankruptcy filing projections for 2019 here. The Report states that bankruptcies worldwide increased by 10% in 2018 and it projects an additional 6% increase for 2019. What surprised me is that the increase in bankruptcies worldwide stems almost solely from an increase in formal bankruptcy proceedings in China. The 10% increase worldwide for 2018 was due almost entirely to a 60% increase in China…
On January 3rd, according to the owner of a smoke shop in Yuma, Arizona, officials from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) seized a variety of CBD products from the store’s shelves. The officials took fewer than fifty items and told the owner to anticipate follow-up paperwork within seven to ten business days. According to the owner’s account, FDA officials had stopped by the shop a few days earlier and asked what products were edible…
Yesterday we wrote on how our China attorneys were hearing (mostly by email) of increasing arrests of foreigners in China and of how clients and readers were writing asking if they should go to China or not. Yesterday’s post, Five Things to do to Avoid Getting Arrested in China, was an effort to address those issues. At the end of that post, we pointedly solicited reader help on what more people can do to…
A few months ago, I wrote a blog post about the precarious state of industrial-hemp derived CBD in California. Since then, as everyone knows, President Trump signed the Agricultural Improvement Act of 2018 (or “Farm Bill”). A lot of people think that in the wake of the Farm Bill, hemp-derived CBD (“Hemp CBD”) is now completely legal. This is in many cases a wildly inaccurate misconception—especially in California. Now, the legal status of Hemp CBD…