Willemijn Aerdts

Willemijn Aerdts is the Netherlands' Minister for Foreign Trade and Development, the cabinet post responsible for inbound foreign investment screening under the Wet veiligheidstoets investeringen, fusies en overnames (VIFO Act, in force from 1 June 2023). Her portfolio covers economic security, export controls, and the Bureau Toetsing Investeringen (BTI), the national body that assesses acquisition risk. She sits within the cabinet of Prime Minister Dick Schoof, the Coalition formed after the November 2023 elections.

On 26 May 2026 Aerdts prohibited Kyndryl's EUR 100m acquisition of Dutch cloud provider Solvinity, ruling that the deal posed an unacceptable risk to public-interest infrastructure. The prohibition was the first ever issued against a US acquirer under Dutch screening law, and turned on the US CLOUD Act: an American parent company would be legally compellable to disclose data held by a Dutch subsidiary, including DigiD and MijnOverheid records, to US authorities without a Dutch court order. The Dutch competition authority ACM had cleared the deal on antitrust grounds in February; investment screening runs on a separate legal track and reached the opposite conclusion .

Aerdts' prohibition landed while the European Commission's Cloud and AI Development Act (CAIDA) was still awaiting its fourth scheduled adoption date. The Dutch decision demonstrated that member states already hold the statutory tool CAIDA is trying to legislate at EU level: national investment-screening law can reach the US CLOUD Act exposure that Brussels is still debating in committee. The precedent is legally narrow but politically significant. It gives other member states a template for blocking US cloud acquisitions involving national digital infrastructure without waiting for EU legislation to clear. Her ministry has not publicly indicated whether further acquisitions are under review, but the BTI is now formally on record as capable of and willing to issue prohibition orders on sovereignty grounds.