Rotterdam: Lawyers advising on a container terminal sale here now assemble a file that barely existed three years ago. They list every grant, guarantee, tax break and cheap loan any non-EU government handed the buyer over the preceding three years, and they hand the list to competition officials before the deal can close.
That obligation comes from the Foreign Subsidies Regulation, and the Commission has just finished judging its own creation. The review report published on 14 July 2026 concluded that the instrument works, and that the paperwork around it does not.
The numbers behind that verdict tell a plain story. Companies filed roughly 272 merger notifications under the regime. Bidders submitted around 5,150 declarations across 863 public procurement procedures. Officials opened just two investigations on their own initiative. An enormous volume of disclosure produced a very small number of genuine problems.
Competition officials read that ratio as evidence of a screening tool catching what it should while taxing everything it touches. So the Commission proposes to raise the turnover threshold that triggers a merger notification, lift the reporting floor for state-linked financial contributions, and create a shortened procedure for transactions that raise no plausible distortion. Those changes arrive as a legislative amendment in 2027, not sooner.
Enforcement itself faces no softening. The Commission stated that it intends to keep, and where necessary sharpen, its scrutiny of strategically sensitive acquisitions. Energy infrastructure, semiconductors, critical raw materials and defence-adjacent manufacturing sit at the top of that list. The simplification cuts the low-risk tail rather than the high-risk head. Officials set out the reasoning in their review announcement.
Businesses complained about two things during the consultation, and the report repeats both. Collecting three years of financial-contribution data across a global group consumes months, particularly where subsidiaries received routine regional support that nobody previously tracked. And the procedures run long, because the clock only starts once officials declare a notification complete.
Neither complaint touches the substance of the regime, which explains why the Commission left the substantive test alone. Guidelines adopted on 9 January 2026 already told companies how officials weigh distortion against the benefits a subsidised investment brings to the internal market. Those guidelines stand.
The gap between diagnosis and remedy will frustrate the people who filed the complaints. A 2027 amendment must pass through Parliament and Council, and a co-decision file on foreign investment screening rarely moves quickly. Dealmakers who hoped the July report would immediately shrink their disclosure obligations instead face at least another eighteen months of the current rules.
Critics of the regime make a different argument. Raising thresholds, they say, hands an easy route to exactly the state-backed acquirers the law targets, because a buyer can structure a purchase to sit below a higher trigger. The Commission answers that its ex officio powers cover any transaction regardless of threshold, and that it has used those powers sparingly because it found little to pursue.
Both positions rest on the same thin evidence base of two own-initiative cases. Three more years of enforcement data will settle the question better than any consultation. Until then, the terminal deal in this port still needs its three-year subsidy inventory, and the lawyers assembling it will keep charging by the hour. The Commission’s own case register remains the only public measure of whether the burden buys anything.
