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The Supreme Court held 4/22/03 that a corporation may invoke the protections of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (“FSIA”) only if a foreign state itself, as distinguished from another government corporation, directly owns a majority of the corporation’s shares, and even then only if the foreign state owns those shares at the time the complaint is filed. The two companion cases involved a pair of Israeli chemical companies that the Israeli government owned through several intermediate holding companies. By the time suit was filed in state court in Hawaii, Israel had privatized the companies. After the named defendants impleaded them into the case, the Israeli companies invoked the FSIA to remove the case to federal court. The Supreme Court offered two alternative grounds for holding that the Israeli companies were not entitled to invoke the FSIA. First, Congress intended that corporate formalities apply to questions of “ownership” under the FSIA. Here, Israel did not “own” the companies; instead, it owned shares of other companies that in turn owned shares of the chemical companies. Second, even if Israel had owned the companies within the meaning of the FSIA at one time, the companies still would not have qualified for the protections of the Act, because Israel had sold its interest in them by the time suit was filed. Relying on Congress’s use of the present tense in the relevant provision and drawing an analogy to diversity jurisdiction, the Court concluded that a corporation’s status under the FSIA should be determined at the time of filing of the complaint. Justices Breyer and O’Connor dissented on the first point, finding no policy reason why Congress would distinguish between directly owned subsidiaries and subsidiaries owned through an intermediate holding company. The decision is important to all parties who are, or have dealings with, companies indirectly owned by foreign governments.See also case # 01-593, Dole Food Co. v. Patrickson