From: Telegram.com
By David McLaughlin, BLOOMBERG NEWS
Lenovo Group Ltd. must convince government officials that buying a server unit from International Business Machines Corp. won’t give China back-door access to U.S. secrets and infrastructure.
The wrinkle is that the Pentagon, the FBI and the nation’s biggest telecommunications companies buy the IBM servers, according to people familiar with the matter and an analysis by Bloomberg Industries.
Use of the servers by the government, telephone networks and other potentially sensitive customers will spark close scrutiny from the interagency group known as the Committee on Foreign Investment in the
U.S., which investigates national- security risks of foreign acquisitions of domestic companies.
“It’s kind of the perfect storm of issues,” said Anne Salladin, a former Treasury Department official who worked on CFIUS reviews and is now at Stroock & Stroock & Lavan LLP in Washington. “Any foreign
acquirer with this kind of asset purchase is very likely to be something that CFIUS would want to take a look at.”
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