Industrial Policy & Trade Monitor· 2663 actions· ✨ 89 recent

Turkey's Public Procurement Authority published Communiqué No. 2026/1 in the Official Gazette (22 January 2026, Gazette No. 33145), raising the monetary thresholds and limits under Public Procurement Law No. 4734 by 27.67% — the December 2025 year-on-year change in the domestic producer price index (Yİ-ÜFE), applied per the Law's Article 67 mandatory annual indexation mechanism. The revised thresholds apply from 1 February 2026 through 31 January 2027, including an international-tender threshold of TL 18,734,124 for general-budget goods/services procurement and TL 686,924,429 for construction/works tenders. Global Trade Alert logged the update as a public-procurement-access intervention because raising the monetary bands widens the range of below-threshold tenders eligible for domestic-restricted procedures.

The European Commission adopted Communication C(2026) 43 final on 9 January 2026, issuing the first formal interpretive guidelines on the Foreign Subsidies Regulation (FSR, Regulation (EU) 2022/2560). The guidelines codify a four-pillar analytical framework — distortion assessment, public-procurement distortion test, balancing test, and ex officio call-in scope — that DG COMP will apply in every future FSR enforcement proceeding. As the operational blueprint for the FSR regime, the guidelines materially shape Chinese SOE and Gulf SWF EU-market access planning for concentrations, public-procurement tenders, and sub-threshold transactions.

On 10 December 2025 the European Commission opened an in-depth investigation under the Foreign Subsidies Regulation (FSR) — its first ex officio Phase II investigation — into whether Chinese state-controlled security-scanner producer Nuctech received foreign subsidies enabling it to offer prices and conditions that EU competitors could not match across airport, port, and border-crossing markets. Nuctech Technology, controlled by Tsinghua Tongfang (PRC state-linked), operates EU subsidiaries in Poland and the Netherlands (Nuctech Warsaw and Nuctech Netherlands), supplying threat-detection scanners to roughly 80% of EU airports and 70% of EU sea and land border crossings. The case (FS.100068) followed April 2024 unannounced FSR dawn raids at Nuctech's Polish and Dutch premises — one of the first uses of FSR inspection powers — and sets a precedent for ex officio scrutiny of state-subsidised foreign incumbents beyond the M&A and public-procurement tracks where FSR had previously operated.

On 3 April 2024 the European Commission opened two simultaneous FSR Phase II in-depth investigations — the second and third ever under the Foreign Subsidies Regulation (Regulation 2022/2560) — concerning a Romanian public-procurement procedure for the design, construction and operation of a 454.97 MW EU-co-funded photovoltaic park (Rovinari Est). The first investigation targeted the ENEVO Group consortium including LONGi Solar Technologie GmbH (German subsidiary wholly owned by HK-listed LONGi Green Energy Technology Co., Ltd.); the second targeted Shanghai Electric UK Co. Ltd. and Shanghai Electric Hong Kong International Engineering Co., Ltd. (Chinese SOE). Both respondents withdrew from the procurement procedure after the Commission's opening; the Commission subsequently closed both investigations. This was the first FSR Phase II enforcement action in the renewable-energy / solar-PV sector and the first targeting a private Chinese-listed company's EU subsidiary.

Regulation (EU) 2023/2675 — the Anti-Coercion Instrument (ACI) — is the EU's first horizontal trade-defence framework explicitly empowering the Union to respond to economic coercion by third countries. Adopted by the European Parliament and Council on 22 November 2023, published in the Official Journal on 7 December 2023, and in force from 27 December 2023, it lets the European Commission (i) determine that a third country is applying economic coercion against the Union or a Member State, (ii) seek dialogue, cessation, and reparation, and (iii) impose Union response measures — including tariffs, services-trade restrictions, IP-rights restrictions, public-procurement restrictions, and FDI restrictions targeting nationals or controlled entities of the coercing state. It complements but does not duplicate the Foreign Subsidies Regulation (which addresses subsidies, not coercion).

Venezuela's Constitutional Anti-Blockade Law, adopted by the National Constituent Assembly on 8 October 2020 and published in Gaceta Oficial Extraordinaria N° 6.583 on 12 October 2020, establishes a "special and temporary" horizontal legal framework empowering the Executive Branch to suspend or derogate any law of the Republic when necessary to counteract the effects of unilateral coercive measures imposed against Venezuela (Article 19 — the broadest sanctions- countermeasure derogation authority in the Western Hemisphere). The law also creates the Centro Internacional de Inversión Productiva (CIIP), a special-jurisdiction FDI vehicle empowered to negotiate confidentially with foreign investors, conduct asset-protection mechanisms, and operate entirely outside ordinary public-procurement, accounting, and FX-control law. Constitutes the foundational parent statute for the VE counter-sanctions legal corpus and closes the VE=0 gap on the action register.