Today the European Commission (the "EU Commission") authorized the free flow of personal data to Japan. This Legal Update discusses this "adequacy decision," which was issued jointly with a mirroring decision by the Japanese government and allows personal data to transfer between the European Union (the "EU") and Japan freely and under strong guarantees of protection.

Bylined article by Insurance Regulatory partner Lawrence Hamilton (Chicago) and associate Sanjiv Tata (New York), Intellectual Property & IT partner Oliver Yaros (London), Cybersecurity & Data Privacy partner Charles-Albert Helleputte (Brussels), counsel Kendall Burman (Washington DC) and associate Diletta De Cicco (Brussels) and Litigation & Dispute Resolution counsel Evan Wooten (Los Angeles).

On 8 January 2019, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment (MEE), formerly the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) of the People's Republic of China (PRC") published the draft new Regulation on the Environmental Risk Assessment and Control of Chemical Substances (Consultative Draft) (the draft "New Regulation") for public comments until 20 February 2019.

On December 13, 2018, the US Internal Revenue Service released an initial set of proposed regulations addressing a number of open issues under the Base Erosion Anti-Abuse Tax (BEAT) rules.

On November 26, 2018, the US Internal Revenue Service released an advance version of Revenue Procedure 2018-59 (the “revenue procedure”), which would allow taxpayers providing certain infrastructure-related services in public-private partnerships to avoid the application of the Section 163(j) business interest limitations.

On December 13, 2018, the US Internal Revenue Service released an initial set of proposed regulations addressing a number of open issues under the Base Erosion Anti-Abuse Tax (BEAT) rules. The proposed regulations are scheduled to apply to 2018 tax years. The proposed regulations provide favorable guidance on payments to US branches and the application of the BEAT to services eligible for the service cost method, but transfer-priced at a markup. The proposed regulations also contain a number of rules likely to be challenging to taxpayers, including tracing excess interest to worldwide liabilities, flooring taxable income at zero when a taxpayer has a net operating loss carryover and excluding qualified derivative payments from the denominator of the base erosion percentage. Mark Leeds of the New York office of Mayer Brown explores the proposed regulations under the BEAT rules in this Legal Update, which published in the January 7, 2019 issue of Tax Notes magazine.

Richard looks at some legal developments and deadlines in the pensions industry that will occur, or are expected to occur, during the course of 2019.

For more than a century, a creditor holding English law governed debt relied on the principle (known as the “rule in Gibbs”) that a debt governed by English law cannot be discharged by a foreign insolvency proceeding, provided that the creditor does not submit to that proceeding.

With rapid economic development and rising income, there has been an increase in demand for high-quality education (in particular, private education) in various countries in Southeast Asia. As a result, there has been growing interest from private equity sponsors and institutional investors in the education sector in Southeast Asia.

REVERSEinquiries is Mayer Brown’s structured and market-linked products-focused newsletter.

On January 7, 2019, the US self-regulatory organization the National Futures Association (“NFA”) announced that it had adopted amendments, which become effective April 1, 2019, to its information security requirements that include a cybersecurity incident notification obligation.

The partial federal government shutdown has halted a range of government operations.