Dutch Investment Screening Bureau

The Bureau Toetsing Investeringen (BTI, formally the Dutch Investment Screening Bureau) is the administrative body within the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs responsible for screening inbound foreign investments, mergers and acquisitions for national-security and public-interest risk. It was established under the Wet veiligheidstoets investeringen, fusies en overnames (VIFO Act), which entered into force on 1 June 2023. The BTI reviews notified transactions, conducts confidential risk assessments, and issues binding recommendations to the responsible minister, who holds the formal authority to approve or prohibit a deal. Screening covers sectors defined as vital: energy, water, telecoms, transport and digital infrastructure, among others. The review period is typically 8 weeks, extendable to 6 months for complex cases.

On 26 May 2026, acting on a BTI recommendation, Minister Willemijn Aerdts issued the first-ever prohibition of a US-acquirer deal under the VIFO Act, blocking Kyndryl's EUR 100m bid for cloud provider Solvinity. The ground was US CLOUD Act exposure: Kyndryl, as a US-incorporated entity, could be legally compelled by American courts to disclose data held by a Dutch subsidiary, including DigiD national digital-identity records, without a Dutch court order. The ACM (Dutch competition authority) had cleared the deal on antitrust grounds in February; the BTI's national-security track reached the opposite conclusion .

The BTI's first US-deal prohibition establishes a live precedent in European investment-screening practice: CLOUD Act exposure in a US-incorporated acquirer is a cognisable public-interest risk when the target hosts critical national digital infrastructure. Before this ruling, it was unclear whether member-state screening bodies would treat the CLOUD Act as a sovereignty risk warranting prohibition, or merely as a regulatory disclosure requirement. The Kyndryl/Solvinity outcome answers that question for the Netherlands and provides a template other European investment-screening bodies (in Germany, France, Italy and Spain) could follow. The decision also demonstrates that member states already hold a functional equivalent of the tool the European Commission's Cloud and AI Development Act is still trying to legislate.