Stefan Kirwitzke advises clients on all questions relating to EU and German antitrust and competition law as well as international trade and investment law. At the intersection of competition and trade law, Stefan guides clients to successfully close their multi-jurisdictional M&A transactions in the context of merger control and foreign investment control proceedings. He focusses his practice on international, cross-border cases and has experience handling complex global mergers in front of the European Commission, the German Federal Cartel Office and Ministry of Economics as well as coordinating merger and FDI filings in jurisdictions globally towards multiple regulators. Stefan also advises on sanctions and export controls in a German, European and international context as well as procurement law, specialising in defence procurement. With a background in diplomacy and policy, Stefan has a sound understanding of liaising between international clients respectively and in their relation to international authorities. Prior to joining the firm, Stefan completed traineeships in the Hamburg and Ho-Chi-Minh-City offices of another international law firm and at the German Embassy in Bratislava, Slovakia. Stefan is German-qualified and undertook his legal education at the Universities of Münster and Salzburg and at the Appellate Court of the Federal State of Schleswig-Holstein. Besides German law, he focused his studies on international and European private and public law as well as common law, working inter alia with a London-based law firm.
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In its Second Annual Report on the screening of foreign direct investment (FDI) into the Union, the EU Commission takes stock of the FDI screening rules at both EU and Member State level. Today, 25 out of 27 Member States either have a screening mechanism in place or are in the process of (...)
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For the first time ever, the EU Commission has issued a decision on the relationship between EU merger control law and national FDI screening rules. It found that the Hungarian Government’s veto of Vienna Insurance Group’s planned acquisition of the Hungarian subsidiaries of Dutch insurer AEGON (...)
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All good things are worth waiting for? Not in the case of the planned takeover of Munich-based chip supplier Siltronic by its Taiwanese rival GlobalWafers. After more than a year of intense FDI screening, the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action let the deal fail. (...)
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Regulators are becoming increasingly active in imposing measures on deals or prohibiting them altogether under FDI rules – with prohibitions happening in the EU’s largest economies Germany, France, and Italy in the past months. Against this backdrop, Germany is moving forward on its plans for (...)
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Foreign investment control has become a key factor in M&A deals and 2020 was a particularly eventful year. A large number of countries have recently introduced foreign investment control regimes (or tightened their existing rules) and made use of them with, for example, prohibitions (...)
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Foreign investment control has become a key factor in M&A deals and 2020 has been an eventful year. A large number of economies have introduced foreign investment control regimes or tightened their existing rules. Now it appears that it is time to make use of them: this week Germany has (...)
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The long-awaited application of the European Union (EU) Regulation on a framework for the screening of foreign direct investment (FDI) in the EU started, 11 October 2020. It is still early days to anticipate how the EU rules will be implemented in practice by the member states and the European (...)
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Following the European Commission’s prohibition of the Alstom-Siemens transaction, the French and German governments published a manifesto calling for a reform of current EU merger rules to shape a "European industrial policy fit for the 21st Century." This manifesto appears to be directly (...)
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