Tech investors chafe at foreign investment rules

Thu, 21 Jan 2021

Are Rocket Lab and Xero, two of our most successful tech companies, strategic to the country and in the national interest?Informally, we tend to view them as such. Those companies, and a handful more, are considered essential to our NZ Inc. story. Efforts by foreign investors to take significant ownership stakes in them are also subject to an “investor test” and national interest assessment by the Overseas Investment Office (OIO), just like many other large New Zealand asset sales to foreign entities: farms, paper mills and ban...

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