Foreign buyers wanting to purchase an asset in Australia often find themselves entangled in a fickle and opaque approval process, according to the findings of a senate inquiry into the country’s foreign-investment ombudsman.
The arbitrary nature in which the Foreign Investment Review Board Firb assesses applications leads to “significant shortcomings in the transparency of the process and in the scrutiny of the national-interest test”, the inquiry concluded.
In some cases, foreign buyers...