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.