The Lisbon Portfolio

The Lisbon Portfolio is an action-adventure story in which our hero, photographer Henry White, is drawn into a web of corporate intrigue and murder while on assignment for a major, multi-national corporation in Lisbon, Portugal in 1999. Henry White doesn't know who to trust in this action packed and richly textured tale of spies and meeting planners. From the Russian Mafia to the CIA to a Chinese organization that specializes in stealing technology secrets, the bad guys are thick on the ground and Henry has to depend on his previous years of experience working as an intelligence researcher, under cover as a corporate photographer, to make it out of Lisbon alive----and to save the world from an invention that may unlock the frightening promise of making miniature nuclear bombs.

The European Union (EU) has emerged as a key actor in the global investment regime since the 1980s. At the same time, international investment policy and agreements, which govern international investment liberalisation, treatment and protection through investor-to-state dispute settlement, have become increasingly contentious in the European public debate. This book provides an accessible introduction to international investment policy and seeks to explain how the EU became an actor in the global investment regime. It offers a detailed analysis of the EU’s participation in all major trade and investment negotiations since the 1980s and EU-internal competence debates to identify the causes behind the EU’s growing role in this policy domain. Building on principal-agent and historical institutionalist models of incremental institutional change, the book shows that Commission entrepreneurship was instrumental in the emergence of the EU as a key actor in the global investment regime. It refutes business-centred liberal intergovernmental explanations, which suggest that business lobbying made the Member States accept the EU’s growing role and competence in this domain. The book lends support to supranational and challenges intergovernmental thinking on European Integration. This text will be of key interest to scholars, students and practitioners of European and regional integration, EU foreign relations, EU trade and international investment law, business lobbying, and more broadly of international political economy.

The entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty entails sweeping changes with respect to foreign investment regulation. Most prominently, the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) now contains in its Article 207 an explicit competence for the regulation of foreign direct investment as part of the Common Commercial Policy (CCP) chapter. With this new competence, the EU will become an important actor in the field of international investment politics and law. The new empowerment in the field of international investment law prompts a multitude of questions. This volume analyzes in depth the new “post-Lisbon situation” in the area of investment policy, provokes further discussion and offers new approaches.

This paper reviews the coordinated portfolio investment survey (CPIS) guide. The objectives of CPIS are to collect comprehensive information, with geographical detail on the country of residence of the issuer, on the stock of cross-border equities, long-term bonds and notes, and short-term debt instruments for use in the compilation or improvement of international investment position statistics on portfolio investment capital. This paper discusses the scope and modalities of the CPIS. It also presents key findings of the 1997 CPIS and 2001 CPIS.

Are courts resisting the rise of legal limitations to state action caused by investment treaty commitments? This book pioneers a unique analysis of both investment law and comparative constitutional law by examining how a selection of the highest courts around the world have addressed this potential discord.

This book examines the varied competences of the European Union (EU) in relation to its capacity to externalize its policy preferences. Specifically, it explores the continued resilience within the EU’s policy toolbox of supranational modes of governance beyond the State. The book first situates European experiences of supranationality in relations to the wide variety of regional and global modes of governance it comes into contact with when seeking to deal with an increasingly complex and fragmented international environment. Over the course of its subsequent sections, the book analyses the resilience, flexibility and adaptability of the EU’s supranational practices across a significant cross-section of policy fields, for example, Area Freedom of Justice, Justice and Security; Socio-economic Governance; or Trade Policies. Overall, these chapters unpack the impact of the EU’s internal institutional complexity on the EU's external capacity to export its preferences in an increasingly fragmented international environment. This in turn, sees the book also question whether the EU has the institutional tools to guarantee and implement consistency between its internal and external policies. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of EU politics/studies and more broadly to International relations, International/EU Law, comparative regionalism, international political economy, security studies, international law.

Criticism. Doubts. Second thoughts. Although investor-state arbitration (ISA) has been included in investment agreements between developed and developing countries since the 1960s, and provided foreign investors with a kind of private justice against developing world host states, it became increasingly controversial in developed countries when it was included in NAFTA in 1993, creating the possibility of ISA claims between and against two developed countries (the United States or Canada), as well as claims against and by a developing state (Mexico). A few years later, the OECD’s attempt to finalize the Multilateral Agreement on Investment was stymied by concerted civil society protest and opposition to ISA, and in recent years each new proposed agreement has sparked fresh rounds of protest. What engenders the controversy about ISA? While ISA’s advantage is that it prevents escalation of international conflict by relieving states from feeling obliged to espouse claims of injured investors against foreign governments, it is criticized for creating regulatory chill whereby states are reluctant to make necessary public policy reforms for fear that changes to the investment environment will lead to expensive investor claims. Are fears of litigation and expensive payouts well founded? Can key modifications to the ISA system, such as those added to the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement satisfy critics and redeem this system of private justice? Is ISA really necessary between developed democracies where an independent and professional judiciary can generally be trusted to decide without fear or favour? In Second Thoughts: Investor-State Arbitration between Developed Democracies, 16 international investment legal experts have undertaken in-depth analyses of ISA’s economic, political, and social impacts when included in agreements between developed democracies. This timely volume appears at a critical moment, seeking answers to the crucial questions that will determine the next generation of international investment agreements.

This book demonstrates how human rights obligations of the EU foreign constitution can be operationalized in the realm of international economic regulation. The content is divided into three major parts. The first outlines the legal foundations needed for the EU to become a shaper of international investment law, which include the general principles and objectives of EU external policies, the Charter of Fundamental Rights, international human rights and the international investment competences of the EU. The second part demonstrates the current international investment regime’s incompatibility with human rights interests, while the third analyzes two mechanisms stemming from trade Law – ex-ante human rights impact assessments and civil society monitoring bodies – and explores whether they could mitigate the current inequalities in the protection of rights. The potential of these mechanisms, the book argues, lies in their capacity to ensure a comprehensive assessment of all interests at stake, and to empower traditionally marginalized rights-holders to make, shape and contest the international investment regime.

In order to understand the reform of international investment law envisioned by the EU, the author provides a comprehensive but concise analysis of the EU reform approaches, its constitutional and legal framework, the concepts of the rule of law and legitimacy, and the reasons for the reform. In particular, the book exposes tensions between the EU aspiration to enhance the rule of law in international investment law, as a means of legitimising this legal discipline, and the challenges of its reform approaches in practice. The analysis combines substantive and procedural aspects of the EU reform of international investment law in the intra-EU context and EU external relations. This book thus critically evaluates the EU vision of the rule of law in international law and its contribution to the development of international law in the field of investment.