Electronic Communications Notice

Scope and effect

We write to counterparties in the United States, Canada, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Latin America, Africa, Asia-Pacific and elsewhere. The rules that govern that correspondence differ sharply between those places. Rather than say something vague enough to be true everywhere, this notice states our actual position and, where a common piece of email boilerplate has little or no legal force, says so.

This is a general notice. It is not legal advice, it is not tailored to your situation, and reading it does not create a lawyer-client relationship between you and anyone. If a specific matter turns on any of this, take advice from your own counsel.

Effective [EFFECTIVE DATE]. Version 1.0.

What this notice is, and what it cannot do

This notice records our position on the correspondence we send and receive. It is a statement, not a contract. We do not claim that reading an email from us, or landing on this page, places you under obligations to us.

That matters, because a great deal of email boilerplate quietly assumes the opposite. A notice appended to a message cannot impose duties on someone who never agreed to them, cannot manufacture consent, cannot choose a governing law or a court for a person who has not assented, and cannot override a mandatory rule of the law that protects you where you live or work. Where this notice says something has limited legal effect, that is not modesty — it is the accurate position, and we would rather state it than repeat folklore.

What this notice does do is give you accurate information, put you on notice of things you are entitled to know before you write to us, and set out the practices we hold ourselves to. Several of the statements below — how we handle payment instructions, how we treat published project figures, what happens to correspondence sent to a government agency — are worth more to you than any confidentiality legend.

Where we have a signed agreement with you, that agreement governs. Where you use our private platform, the platform terms you accepted govern your use of it. This notice fills the space that neither covers.

Nothing here is legal, tax, investment, accounting, engineering or regulatory advice, and nothing here creates an advisory, agency, fiduciary, partnership or joint venture relationship with anyone.

Who is writing to you

Communications referring to Applied America are sent by [EXACT REGISTERED LEGAL NAME], a nonprofit corporation organised under the laws of [STATE OF INCORPORATION], recognised as exempt from federal income tax under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, EIN [EIN].

Applied America is [a division / a registered assumed name] of that organisation. It is not a separate legal entity, it does not contract in its own name, and any agreement you reach is with [EXACT REGISTERED LEGAL NAME].

Our postal address is: 207 Delaware Ave, Wilmington, DE 19806, United States

Our only official domains are thecefa.org and its subdomains, including applied.thecefa.org. Correspondence from any other domain is not from us, whatever the signature block says.

This notice covers messages sent by our employees, officers and engaged contractors from an account on those domains, acting in that capacity. It does not cover personal accounts, messages written by directors, advisers or affiliated organisations in a personal or other capacity, messages sent by counterparties or service providers about our projects, or anything sent from a domain that merely resembles ours.

We publish these particulars because they are useful to counterparties, not because we are required to. Several jurisdictions require companies registered there to state prescribed particulars on business letters and email — the European Union under its company-law disclosure directives, the United Kingdom under the Companies Act 2006 and the trading disclosure regulations made under it, and Germany under the Commercial Code and the GmbH Act. Those duties bind entities formed or registered in those jurisdictions. We are a United States nonprofit with no company registration, no registered establishment and no commercial-register entry in any of them, so they do not apply to us. We give the equivalent information anyway.

Confidentiality — and an honest account of what a confidentiality notice achieves

Our correspondence routinely contains commercially sensitive material: project economics, capital structures, counterparty positions, diligence findings, and information we hold under confidentiality obligations owed to other people.

Where a message or attachment is marked confidential, or where its nature makes confidentiality obvious, we ask you to treat it that way — do not disclose it, forward it, publish it, or use it for any purpose other than the one it was sent for.

We make three things explicit, because most notices of this kind are not honest about them.

First, this is a request. The familiar footer — "this email is confidential; if you are not the intended recipient you are prohibited from reading, copying or disclosing it" — does not bind a stranger. There is no offer, no acceptance, no consideration, and the recipient reads it only after the disclosure has already happened. We do not pretend otherwise.

Second, if you do owe us a duty of confidence, it comes from somewhere else: a signed non-disclosure agreement, your professional obligations, trade secret law, or the general law of confidence — which in England and several other jurisdictions can attach where information reaches someone who knows, or ought to know, that it is confidential and was not meant for them. A clear marking supports that argument. It is not the source of the duty.

Third, we mark what is genuinely sensitive rather than stamping every message. Indiscriminate marking weakens the position rather than strengthening it: it invites the argument that we never distinguished our real secrets from our lunch orders.

We reserve all rights and waive none, including the right to seek injunctive relief.

If a message from us reaches you by mistake

Email goes to the wrong person. If one of ours reaches you in error, we would be grateful if you would tell us at applied@thecefa.org, not forward or publish it, not rely on it, and delete it — except to the extent you are required to keep it.

That exception is deliberate and is missing from almost every notice of this kind. We are not asking anyone to destroy records they are obliged to retain, whether under a litigation hold, a regulatory record-keeping duty, a public-records law, a professional obligation, or a backup system that cannot be selectively purged. If you are under a preservation duty, preserve. A boilerplate instruction to delete, sent into a live dispute, is worse than useless.

If you are a lawyer and you receive a document from us that you know or reasonably should know was sent inadvertently, the notification duty that applies in your jurisdiction applies regardless of anything on this page.

We should also say plainly that your cooperation, welcome as it is, does not discharge our own obligations. A misdirected message containing personal data may be a personal data breach that we have to assess and, where required, report to a supervisory authority and to the people affected. That assessment runs whatever you do with the message, and no confidentiality legend affects it. Regulators have fined organisations six-figure sums for misdirected email whose footers said exactly what everyone's footers say.

Nothing we send by email forms a contract

We negotiate by email. We do not conclude binding agreements by email.

Unless a message says expressly that it is intended to create legal relations and is sent by a person authorised under section 7 below, then:

(a) nothing we send is an offer, an acceptance, a counter-offer, a commitment of funds, a term sheet intended to bind, a waiver, or a representation you may rely on;

(b) no exchange of messages forms a contract, however detailed, however commercially complete, and however many points appear settled;

(c) all discussions are subject to contract, subject to satisfactory diligence, and subject to the internal, board, committee and funder approvals that apply to us;

(d) no course of dealing, no pattern of prior conduct, and no failure to repeat this reservation in a particular message waives it; and

(e) any figure for price, capital, timing, allocation, structure or return stated in an electronic communication is indicative and non-binding until it appears in a signed definitive agreement.

We are equally not bound by an electronic communication from you: we do not treat your messages as offers we can accept, and nothing we write should be read as accepting anything you have proposed.

We put this at some length because the law leans the other way. In the United States, an emailed name can satisfy a signature and statute-of-frauds requirement where the intent to sign is present. In England, an automatically generated email footer bearing the sender's name has been held to be a signature, and a guarantee has been held to be concluded across a chain of emails. Courts look at the substance of the exchange. A disclaimer contradicted by the body of a message loses — so this section works only because our people are expected to draft consistently with it, and you should tell us if one of them does not.

Electronic signatures and electronic records

We do not agree to conduct transactions by electronic means, and we do not accept electronic records or electronic signatures as a way of forming or varying an agreement, except where we have expressly agreed to do so in writing for a specific transaction, or where we execute through [NAMED E-SIGNATURE PLATFORM] under section 7.

Accordingly:

(a) a name typed at the end of a message, an automatically appended signature block, a name in a From, Reply-To or display field, a sign-off such as "confirmed" or "agreed", an initial, a logo, a scanned signature image, an emoji or reaction, an authentication header, or the act of sending from an account bearing someone's name, is not executed or adopted by us with any intent to sign, and is not an electronic signature;

(b) no message, attachment, thread, calendar entry, chat or platform record is a signed writing for the purposes of any statute of frauds or any requirement for a signed or written agreement;

(c) our use of email or of an electronic platform to discuss a matter is not conduct from which agreement to transact electronically may be inferred, and this is our express and continuing statement to the contrary.

Where an existing agreement requires variations to be in writing and signed, email exchanges do not vary it.

We are not arguing that an electronic message is incapable of binding anyone. Under the federal E-SIGN Act and the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act in the United States, and under the eIDAS Regulation in the European Union and its assimilated form in the United Kingdom, a record or signature cannot be denied legal effect merely because it is electronic. That argument would fail. What the law does turn on is intention to sign, and — under UETA — whether the parties agreed to transact electronically at all, judged from context and conduct. This section addresses both.

Who can commit us, and how

Only the following may commit the organisation: [AUTHORISED SIGNATORY TITLES].

No other person — including staff, advisers, consultants, agents, contractors, secondees, project personnel, or counterparties working alongside us — has actual or apparent authority to bind us, to make representations you may rely on, or to vary an existing agreement, whatever their title or seniority appears to be.

We are bound only by a document that is identified as a definitive agreement, amendment or binding commitment, states on its face that it is intended to be legally binding, and is executed by an authorised person named above, either by hand or through [NAMED E-SIGNATURE PLATFORM].

If you are told otherwise, or an arrangement appears to have been agreed outside this process, treat it as unconfirmed and write to [LEGAL / CONTRACT EMAIL] before acting on it.

This is the operative half of section 5. When a court is asked whether an emailed exchange bound an organisation, the sender's authority is one of the first things it looks at, and a published, specific limitation is materially better evidence than a general statement that nothing is binding. It is also more useful to you: it tells you whose word to rely on.

No offer of securities; no solicitation

Nothing on this website, in any of our communications, in any project description, capital plan, financial model, presentation or data-room material, and nothing said by any of our personnel, is:

(a) an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy, any security, fund interest, note, loan participation, partnership or membership interest, or any other instrument;

(b) an offer of any investment, financial product or advisory service;

(c) a recommendation to enter into any transaction; or

(d) an inducement or invitation to invest in any project, company, vehicle or programme we describe.

We are not the issuer of any security, and we do not act as agent, placement agent, distributor or underwriter for any issuer.

If securities are offered in connection with a project we have worked on, that offering will be made by the issuer, only to persons the issuer determines are eligible, and only through definitive offering documents containing the full terms and risk factors. Those documents supersede everything published here. No one should make an investment decision on the basis of this website or of any correspondence from us.

Any such offering will be made only under an effective registration statement or an available exemption. Securities described in our materials have not been registered under the Securities Act of 1933 or under any state securities law, and no federal or state authority has passed upon, approved or endorsed anything we publish.

This site is publicly reachable and we correspond with investors outside the United States. Nothing here is an offer in any jurisdiction where such an offer would be unlawful, and readers outside the United States are responsible for the securities and marketing restrictions of their own jurisdiction. Approaching investors in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom engages prospectus, private-placement and fund-marketing rules that a United States disclaimer does not answer; we treat that as a separate question and address it with the parties concerned.

Why we publish project information, and what it is not

We publish project information — capital requirements, indicative structures, timelines, economic impact estimates — because doing so is part of our development mandate and because public bodies, communities and prospective operating partners need it.

We publish it as general information about the projects we work on. We do not publish it in order to solicit, condition the market for, or generate interest in any private securities offering, and no issuer, sponsor or intermediary should treat it as having been prepared for or coordinated with an offering.

Reading this website, subscribing to our updates, attending an event, completing a contact form or corresponding with our personnel does not create a pre-existing substantive relationship between you and us, and does not create one between you and any issuer, sponsor or capital partner we work with. It does not qualify you to receive any offering and says nothing about whether you are an accredited or qualified investor.

Sponsors, issuers and capital partners are responsible for their own compliance with the securities laws applicable to their offerings, including any restriction on general solicitation and general advertising. We do not undertake, and should not be relied on, to preserve any exemption on which they rely.

One further point of candour. A disclaimer manages attribution and expectation; it does not undo conduct. Whether a publication amounts to general solicitation is assessed on what was published, how widely it could be reached, and whether it conditioned the market — not on the label attached to it.

Projected figures and forward-looking statements

Our materials contain forward-looking statements. They include projected capital requirements and capital stacks; construction, permitting and commissioning timelines; projected employment and payroll effects; expected offtake, utilisation and throughput; estimated returns, yields, coverage ratios and cost of capital; projected tax, tariff, incentive and grant outcomes; anticipated regulatory approvals; and expected participation by public bodies, operating companies and capital partners.

These are estimates prepared for planning and development purposes. They are not facts, promises or guarantees.

Actual outcomes will differ, and may differ materially. Among the things that could cause that: failure to obtain or delay in obtaining permits, environmental approvals, interconnection, right-of-way or land control; changes in federal, state, tribal or local law, tax law, incentive programmes, appropriations or tariff policy; failure of any capital partner, lender, guarantor or public authority to commit, fund or disburse; movements in interest rates, credit spreads, insurance markets or currency; construction cost inflation, labour availability, contractor default and supply-chain disruption; commodity and offtake price movements; counterparty insolvency; changes in trade, sanctions, export-control or foreign-investment-screening policy affecting international partners; litigation and community opposition; force majeure; and the possibility that a project does not proceed at all.

Every figure is stated as at a date. We undertake no obligation to update any of them, whether because of new information, later events or otherwise, except where the law requires it. A figure published last year states our position last year.

We do not claim the benefit of any statutory safe harbour for forward-looking statements; the principal United States safe harbour is not available to an organisation of our kind, and reciting it would be empty. What protects everyone here is accuracy, sourcing and honest labelling. Anti-fraud law applies to what we say regardless of anything on this page, and no cautionary language protects a projection made without a reasonable basis.

No advice, no fiduciary relationship, and our regulatory status

We do not provide investment, legal, tax, accounting, actuarial, engineering, valuation or regulatory advice, and nothing we publish or send should be relied on as such. Take your own professional advice before acting.

We are not registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission or with any state securities regulator as a broker, dealer, investment adviser, municipal advisor or funding portal, and we do not hold ourselves out as any of those. We are not a bank, lender, trust company, insurance producer, money transmitter or commercial-finance licensee, and we are not a law, accounting, engineering or appraisal firm. We do not effect securities transactions for the account of others and we do not receive compensation contingent on the completion or size of any financing described in our communications. [CONFIRM AS FACTUALLY ACCURATE BEFORE PUBLICATION]

Municipal entities and obligated persons. We are not a municipal advisor and do not provide advice to or on behalf of a municipal entity or obligated person about municipal financial products or the issuance of municipal securities. Information we give public bodies is general information of the kind we make available generally; it is not particularised to any issuer's needs, circumstances or objectives, and it is not a recommendation about the structure, timing, terms or issuance of any municipal security. We do not owe and do not assume a fiduciary duty to any municipal entity, and any public body considering a financing should engage and rely on its own independent registered municipal advisor.

Nothing in our communications, and no discussion, introduction or working relationship, creates a fiduciary, advisory, agency, partnership, joint venture or trust relationship, or any duty of care, unless we have expressly agreed to one in a signed agreement. Where we introduce parties to one another we do so as part of our development mandate; each party is responsible for its own diligence and its own decision.

Sources, verification and reliance

Our materials draw on public datasets, government publications, information supplied by project sponsors, operating companies, public bodies and capital partners, and our own analysis. Except where we say otherwise, we have not independently verified third-party information and we do not represent that it is accurate, complete or current.

We make no representation or warranty, express or implied, as to the accuracy, completeness, suitability or currency of what we publish or send, and to the fullest extent the law permits we disclaim liability for loss arising from reliance on it. Nothing in this notice limits any liability that cannot lawfully be limited, including liability for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation.

No one should rely on our published materials as the sole basis for a commercial, financial, investment, employment, siting or policy decision. Anyone considering a transaction should conduct its own diligence and satisfy itself independently.

We also give no assurance about approvals and incentives. References to permits, entitlements, tax credits, grants, loan programmes, incentive packages or public funding are descriptive. We have no authority to grant, accelerate or guarantee any government approval or award, and nothing we send is a commitment by any public body. Awards are discretionary, carry statutory conditions — including domestic-content, labour, supply-chain and restricted-party requirements — and are frequently subject to recapture. Eligibility depends on facts specific to each project and sponsor and must be confirmed before it is capitalised into a model.

Personal data: what we hold, why, and your rights

[EXACT REGISTERED LEGAL NAME] is the controller of personal data processed through our correspondence and our platform. Our full privacy notice is at [PRIVACY NOTICE URL] and prevails over this summary if the two differ.

What we hold. Professional contact and role data: name, job title, employer, business email address and telephone number, business address, our correspondence with you, and a record of our dealings. We do not seek personal or sensitive information about you through business correspondence.

Where it came from. Sometimes from you directly. Often from somewhere else: public registers and filings, agency and programme announcements, professional directories, conference materials, published company websites and professional profiles, and introductions from mutual contacts. Where your details did not come from you, the law of several jurisdictions requires us to tell you what we hold, why, and where we got it, at the latest when we first write to you. This page, linked from that first message, is how we do it — and we will identify the specific source on request.

Why we hold it. To correspond about projects and programmes; to assess whether an organisation is a suitable counterparty; to administer platform access; to run sanctions, conflicts and integrity screening; to keep an accurate record; and to meet our legal, audit and funder-reporting obligations.

Our basis. Mostly our legitimate interests in identifying and working with the agencies, capital partners, operating companies and advisers relevant to a project, balanced against your rights. Where we are negotiating or performing an agreement with you, the necessity of that. Where the law requires consent, your consent, which you may withdraw at any time.

How long. Correspondence and contact records for the life of the relationship and for [RETENTION PERIOD] afterwards; platform records for [PLATFORM RETENTION PERIOD] after access ends; financial and governance records for the periods required of a United States nonprofit. Suppression-list entries — the record that stops us contacting you — are kept for as long as we send outbound correspondence, because deleting them would defeat their purpose. Where we are on notice of litigation or investigation we must preserve relevant records and cannot delete them on request until the matter is resolved, and material may persist briefly in backups.

Who else sees it. Service providers acting on our documented instructions under written contracts (email and calendar hosting, our platform and cloud infrastructure, document storage, e-signature, analytics, security monitoring); professional advisers under duties of confidence; project counterparties where you have asked for an introduction or are already a participant; government bodies where we are legally required to disclose; and a successor entity in a reorganisation. We do not sell personal data, we do not rent or licence contact lists, and we do not share personal data for cross-context behavioural advertising. We will name the specific recipients relevant to you on request.

Your rights. Depending on where you are, you may ask for a copy of what we hold, have it corrected, have it deleted, have processing restricted, receive it in portable form, object to processing based on our legitimate interests, and withdraw consent. You have an unqualified right to object to direct marketing, and we will stop. You may ask for human review of any decision taken solely by automated means — we do not make decisions with legal or similarly significant effects that way. Write to applied@thecefa.org. We respond within one month for requests under European and United Kingdom law and within 45 days under United States state laws, extending only where the law allows and telling you when we do. There is no charge unless a request is manifestly unfounded or excessive.

You can also complain to your own regulator without coming to us first — your national data protection authority in the EEA, the Information Commissioner's Office in the United Kingdom, the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner in Switzerland, the ANPD in Brazil, the Information Regulator in South Africa, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada or the Commission d'accès à l'information du Québec, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, or your state attorney general or privacy agency in the United States.

A note on scope, stated plainly. Some privacy statutes reach us and some do not. California's consumer privacy law applies to entities operated for profit and so does not apply to us, though California's exemption for business-to-business contact data has expired for organisations that are covered. Several newer state acts — Colorado, Oregon, Delaware and New Jersey among them — do reach nonprofits above their processing thresholds, while most define the people they protect so as to exclude those acting in a commercial or employment capacity. European and United Kingdom law applies to us regardless of our tax status where our activity is directed at people there, which at least in part it is. South Africa's law treats companies themselves as data subjects, so the instinct that business-to-business correspondence sits outside privacy law is simply wrong there. We do not want our practice to turn on those distinctions, so we apply the standards above to everyone whose business contact data we hold.

[IF APPOINTED] Our representative in the European Union is [EU REPRESENTATIVE NAME AND ADDRESS]; in the United Kingdom, [UK REPRESENTATIVE NAME AND ADDRESS]; in Switzerland, [SWISS REPRESENTATIVE NAME AND ADDRESS]. Our data protection officer for Brazil is [BRAZIL ENCARREGADO]. Our Information Officer for South Africa is [SOUTH AFRICA INFORMATION OFFICER]. Where a representative is required and not yet appointed, that is a gap we are closing, not a position we are taking.

Sending information to the United States

We are established in the United States. Our email systems, records and platform are hosted principally there, on infrastructure operated by third-party cloud providers, some of whom process or replicate data in other regions for redundancy and support. Corresponding with us therefore means your information is transferred to and stored in the United States and may be accessed by our staff and providers there. We will tell you the specific hosting regions for each category of information on request.

Where a transfer to us is made by someone subject to European, United Kingdom, Swiss or Brazilian data protection law, we support the safeguards that law requires. In practice that means the European Commission's standard contractual clauses; for United Kingdom transfers the International Data Transfer Agreement or the UK Addendum; the Swiss-recognised clauses; and for Brazil the clauses approved by the ANPD — in each case supported by a transfer risk assessment and by technical and organisational measures. We will enter into the appropriate clauses on request and will tell you which safeguard applies to a particular transfer. For transfers from Canada we remain accountable for information transferred for processing and impose comparable protection by contract, and we complete a privacy impact assessment before transferring information relating to Quebec residents outside Quebec.

We do not build our transfer arrangements on the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. Participation in it is open only to organisations subject to the enforcement jurisdiction of the Federal Trade Commission or the Department of Transportation, which as a nonprofit we are generally not — so self-certification is likely unavailable to us. Independently, the adequacy decision underpinning the Framework remains under challenge in the European courts. Contractual safeguards are our mechanism, and a change in the Framework's status would not disrupt our transfers.

Government access. We should be straightforward. Information held in any country may in principle be reachable by that country's courts, law enforcement and national security authorities, under that country's law and without our agreement. That is true of the United States and of the countries where you are reading this. When we receive a demand — a subpoena, court order, warrant or regulatory request — we check that it is valid and properly served; we object where it is overbroad, defective or seeks privileged material; we produce the narrowest set of information that answers it; and we notify the person whose information is sought unless we are prohibited from doing so. Where a demand comes from an authority outside the United States and concerns information protected by another country's data protection law, we treat the order as not by itself a sufficient basis for disclosure and look for a route through mutual legal assistance or another international agreement. Some of our cloud and communications providers are subject to legal process in their own right and may in some circumstances be compelled without notifying us. We do not give any government voluntary, bulk or unsupervised access to our systems.

Bulletins and invitations, and how to stop hearing from us

Most of what we send is individual correspondence with a named person about a specific matter. Sometimes we send a briefing, invitation or bulletin to a list. This section is about the second kind.

Every such message identifies us, states our postal address in the message itself, and carries a working way to opt out. Opting out is free, and we will never ask you to pay, to give us anything beyond your email address and your preference, or to take any step beyond a reply or a single web page. You can also write to applied@thecefa.org and we will action it by hand. The opt-out route in any message stays live for at least sixty days after it is sent.

We act on requests within five business days at the latest, and normally sooner. We apply an opt-out across all our outbound correspondence, not only the list a message came from, unless you tell us to keep something. To make that stick we keep your address on a suppression list, used only to prevent contact and never to send you anything.

Opting out stops promotional and programme email. It does not stop messages we must send about a live matter — a reply to your own enquiry, a document you asked for, a notice about your platform access, or something required by law or by an agreement between us.

We do not use false or misleading sender information or subject lines, and we do not harvest addresses or generate them by dictionary attack.

Our basis for writing to you differs by country, and we do not pretend to a single global standard. In the United States we operate on an opt-out basis, and there is no exemption for nonprofits — what matters is the primary purpose of the message, not our tax status. In Canada we send only with express consent or a recognised category of implied consent, which most often means a work address you have published without any statement refusing unsolicited messages, where our message genuinely concerns your role; we do not claim the Canadian fundraising exemption for registered charities, because we are neither. In Australia the position is similar and applies equally to messages sent to businesses. In the United Kingdom the marketing consent rule distinguishes individual subscribers from corporate ones, but we identify ourselves and provide an opt-out either way. Several European countries — Germany notably — require prior consent for advertising email even between businesses, and where we send into those countries we work to that stricter standard. Switzerland, South Africa and South Korea require prior opt-in and draw no business-to-consumer line; we do not add addresses in those countries to distribution lists without consent.

Adding an unsubscribe link does not make an unsolicited message lawful everywhere. The United States opt-out model is our floor, not our standard.

[CONFIRM WHICH APPLIES: (a) We do not embed tracking pixels, web beacons or read receipts in our email and do not rewrite links to record whether you opened a message. / (b) Some bulletins contain a small image or rewritten link that records whether the message was opened and whether a link was followed. We use it to measure delivery and detect problems, we obtain consent where the law requires it, and you can opt out at applied@thecefa.org.] Either way, we do not use message-open data to profile or score you or to make any decision about you.

Monitoring, retention and recording

We monitor, filter, scan, log, retain and archive communications sent to and from our systems. We do it to protect our systems and information, to detect malware, phishing, fraud, sanctions and export-control risk and unauthorised disclosure, to comply with legal and record-keeping obligations, to preserve records when litigation or an investigation is reasonably anticipated, and to run our operations. Scanning is automated; a person reads a message only where there is a specific reason, such as a security incident or a legal obligation. Automated tools, including tools using artificial intelligence, may process communications for these purposes.

We tell you this because you are a party to those messages and are entitled to know, and we ask you to pass it on to colleagues who correspond with us, since we cannot notify each of them individually.

We do not claim that telling you is the same as your consenting. Federal law in the United States permits interception where one party consents, but roughly a dozen states require every party to consent, and several other countries treat the confidentiality of communications more strictly still. A notice on a web page is a reasonable record for the first and a weak one for the second. Where the law that applies to you requires your consent, we will seek it separately.

Calls, meetings and video conferences are recorded or transcribed only where participants are told at the start of the session and agree then. Where an automated notetaking or transcription tool is used, we say so at the start. If you do not want a session recorded, tell us and we will not record it.

We use automation, including artificial intelligence, in handling correspondence — spam and threat filtering, classification and routing, extraction into our records, summarisation, translation, screening against sanctions and adverse-media sources, search across our own records, and drafting assistance. No decision producing legal effects concerning you or similarly significantly affecting you is made solely by automated means; a person reviews and is accountable. Where a message from us was generated by an automated system without a person composing or reviewing it, the message will say so. Automated output can be wrong, and nothing produced by an automated system commits us — section 5 applies to it in full. [CONFIRM: our vendor terms prohibit the use of our correspondence to train third-party general-purpose models.]

One last point: your own employer, mail provider or regulator may monitor your mailbox. Nothing we write in a message limits their rights, and no legend on a message from us prevents your organisation from reading it.

Email security, and payment instructions

Ordinary email is not a secure medium and we do not represent that it is. Encryption between mail servers is opportunistic. Messages can be intercepted, delayed, lost, corrupted, altered, spoofed or carry malicious code, and metadata — sender, recipient, subject, timing, routing — is visible more widely than the body. We do not guarantee delivery, timeliness, integrity or receipt, and you should not assume we have received or read a message because it did not bounce.

Please do not send us by ordinary email: credentials or passwords, bank account or payment card details, government identification numbers, health information, material subject to export control, or sensitive personal data. Ask us for a secure channel or use our platform. We scan outgoing messages and attachments; you should scan anything you receive from us before opening it.

We are candid about the standard virus footer. A blanket "we accept no liability whatsoever for viruses" is of limited effect — in the United Kingdom and much of Europe such exclusions are subject to statutory controls on unreasonable exclusion clauses, and asserted against someone we have no contract with it is weak. So, to the fullest extent the law permits and subject to any signed agreement, we exclude liability for loss arising from malicious code, corrupted files or altered content in messages we send, other than loss caused by our own wilful misconduct or gross negligence and other than liability that cannot lawfully be excluded.

Payment instructions. This is the most practically important paragraph on this page for anyone transacting with us.

We will never send you new or changed bank details, wire instructions, payment routing or beneficiary information by email alone. We will never ask you by email to move a payment urgently, to bypass your own controls, to keep a payment from your finance team, or to send funds to an account you have not previously used with us.

If you receive a message that appears to come from us and does any of those things, treat it as fraudulent — whatever the sender address, signature, thread history or attachments appear to show. Before acting on any payment instruction that purports to come from us, verify it by telephone with a person you already know, on a number you held before the message arrived. Do not use a number, link or callback address contained in the message. Do not reply to the message to verify it.

We accept no responsibility for payments made to an account that was not confirmed by that independent verification, and we apply the same rule in reverse: we will not act on changed payment instructions from you without verifying them by voice against a contact we already hold. Report anything of this kind to applied@thecefa.org so we can warn other counterparties.

Correspondence with public bodies may become public

We work with federal, state, tribal, local and foreign agencies, including economic-development offices. Three consequences follow, and they are usually left out of notices like this one.

Public records. Correspondence sent to, received from or copied to a public body may be a public record in that body's hands, disclosable on request under the federal Freedom of Information Act or under a state, tribal or foreign public-records law, and it may be retained, archived and released whether or not it carries a confidentiality marking. A legend on an email does not exempt a record from disclosure.

Where we send confidential commercial or financial information to a public body, we mark it, identify the competitive harm disclosure would cause, and ask to be notified before any release so that we can assert the applicable exemption. We cannot guarantee the outcome; the decision belongs to the agency. If you send us material intended for onward transmission to a public body, tell us before we send it if you consider it confidential and why. The practical test that matters is how the submitter itself treats the information, which is why marking and an assurance of confidentiality at the point of submission are worth more than a footer.

Procurement. Where a solicitation, bid or procurement is under way, contact may be restricted by law to designated people and channels. If a restriction applies, tell us and we will route correspondence through the designated contact. Nothing we send is intended to circumvent a procurement communication restriction, and nothing from us should be treated as a permissible contact.

Do not assume that correspondence with an agency will stay private.

Sanctions, export control and foreign investment

We work with foreign investors and country-level partners on United States industrial and infrastructure assets. That combination attracts several regimes that operate whatever this page says.

Screening. We screen correspondents, counterparties and their beneficial owners against sanctions, restricted-party, politically-exposed-person and adverse-media sources at onboarding and periodically thereafter. We do not knowingly transact with, or facilitate transactions involving, any person targeted by United States sanctions or owned or controlled by such a person. We may decline, pause or discontinue an engagement on these grounds, may be prohibited from explaining why, and no inference should be drawn from our declining to respond. If you believe a screening result about you is wrong, write to applied@thecefa.org and we will correct it. Each counterparty remains responsible for its own screening and compliance.

Export control and technical data. Information about industrial facilities, processes, equipment and designs may be controlled under United States export control law. Releasing controlled technology or technical data to a non-United States person can be an export requiring authorisation even where nothing physically leaves the country — including by email, by granting access to a data room, or during a site visit. We do not warrant the export classification of any material we transmit or host. Do not forward, download, translate or make available material received from us in breach of those rules, and tell us before giving access to any person where controlled technical data may be involved.

Foreign investment review. Investment by a foreign person in United States businesses or in real estate near sensitive sites may be subject to review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. Nothing we publish is a view on whether a particular investment is permissible, requires notification, or would be cleared. We should also say what a reassuring version of this paragraph would leave out: the fact that a project is a new build rather than an acquisition does not put it outside regulation. State restrictions on foreign ownership of land and property, and federal reporting of foreign holdings of agricultural land, apply on their own terms, and the scope of national-security review is itself under active policy pressure. Prospective non-United States investors should take their own advice at the outset and disclose their ownership, control and any government affiliation before diligence begins.

Boycott requests. We will not agree to, and ask counterparties not to include in correspondence, term sheets, letters of credit, tender documents or questionnaires, any request to refuse to do business with a country friendly to the United States or with any person on grounds of nationality, race, religion or national origin, or to furnish information about such relationships. Requests of that kind may be legally reportable and will be handled accordingly.

Anti-corruption, public officials, and our charitable status

We prohibit bribery and corrupt payments in every form and in every jurisdiction. Our personnel may not offer, promise, give, request or accept anything of value to obtain or retain business, to secure an improper advantage, or to influence the act or decision of any public official, employee of a state-owned entity, political party or private counterparty. Facilitation payments are not permitted. Nothing we offer — hospitality, travel, event participation, sponsorship, or an opportunity for someone's relative — may be used to influence an official act. If anyone purporting to act for us suggests otherwise, or if you are asked for an improper payment in connection with one of our projects, report it to applied@thecefa.org.

Our engagement with legislators, agencies, economic-development offices and public officials is conducted within applicable lobbying registration, gift and ethics rules, and within the limits on lobbying that apply to a section 501(c)(3) organisation. References to public bodies, officials or programmes in our materials are descriptive and do not imply their endorsement of us or of any project.

We do not participate or intervene in any political campaign for or against any candidate for public office, and nothing we publish or send should be attributed to any candidate, party or campaign.

We do not act as an agent of any foreign government, foreign political party or other foreign principal in connection with political activities in the United States. Where we work with a country-level partner we do so in our own institutional capacity and in furtherance of our own charitable purposes, and we do not accept instruction, direction, supervision, control or subsidy from any foreign principal in respect of our engagement with United States officials.

Charitable purpose. Participation in a convening, working group, project pipeline or information platform confers no membership, no preferential access to opportunities, no right to be included in any transaction, and no economic entitlement. We do not act as agent for any capital partner, sponsor or operating company. Transactions involving directors, officers, key employees or related parties are subject to our written conflict-of-interest policy and to independent review.

Charitable contributions. This notice is not a solicitation of charitable contributions in any jurisdiction where we are not registered or exempt from registration to solicit, and email is not a receipt. Where we do solicit, we do so in compliance with applicable state charitable solicitation laws, and the disclosures those states require — several of which prescribe exact wording — are published at [CHARITABLE DISCLOSURES URL]. Registration with any state does not imply that state's endorsement, approval or recommendation.

Convenings. We bring together operating companies, suppliers, funds and public bodies that may be competitors. Our communications, convenings and platform are not an invitation to exchange competitively sensitive information — current or future pricing, bids, margins, capacity plans, customer allocation, wages or hiring intentions — and are not a forum for any understanding restricting competition. Participants remain independent and must make those decisions unilaterally. If a discussion heads that way, stop it and tell us.

What you send us

We receive a large volume of unsolicited material. Please read this before sending.

Do not send us confidential information belonging to someone else, and do not send us anything that would breach a duty you owe to your employer, a client, a public body or a counterparty, or that is subject to export control or a protective order. If you send it anyway, we may be unable to protect it and may have to disclose or delete it.

Unsolicited ideas, proposals, project concepts, site introductions, technologies, business plans, draft agreements and investment opportunities are received on a non-confidential and non-obligating basis unless we have signed a confidentiality agreement covering them. We work continuously across many sectors and geographies, and we may already be developing — or may later develop, from independent sources — projects similar to yours. Sending us something creates no obligation to keep it confidential, to evaluate it, to respond, to refrain from pursuing similar work, to pay you, or to attribute it to you. By sending it you confirm you are entitled to, and you allow us to review, store and circulate it internally for the purpose of evaluating it and meeting our own obligations.

If we have a confidentiality agreement with you, that agreement governs and nothing here cuts it down. If you want a confidential discussion, ask us for an agreement before you send anything. We would rather have that conversation first.

Recruitment. Sending us a CV, application or expression of interest creates no employment or engagement relationship, no offer and no obligation to respond. We keep applications for [APPLICATION RETENTION PERIOD] to consider you for current and future roles, and will delete them on request. Please do not send us information about your health, disability, ethnicity, religion, political opinions, trade union membership, sexual orientation, criminal record or immigration status unless we ask; where a lawful process requires it we will request it separately and explain why. We use automated tools to sort and search applications, but hiring decisions are made by people, and where the law requires notice of automated employment decision tools, bias auditing or candidate consent, we comply and will tell you before that stage.

Legal privilege

Some of our correspondence contains or refers to legal advice. Where a message is marked as privileged or as prepared in anticipation of litigation, we assert privilege over it, and disclosure to a person who was not an intended recipient is not a waiver — intentional or otherwise. We reserve the right to seek its return, destruction or exclusion.

Two points that the usual boilerplate obscures.

A marking does not create privilege, and the absence of one does not waive it. Privilege attaches to communications that qualify as a matter of law, and it can be lost by wide circulation, by including people outside the privileged group, or by sharing with third parties without a proper common-interest basis. If you are about to forward correspondence from us, consider whether you are about to waive something. We also mark selectively rather than stamping everything privileged, because indiscriminate labelling is routinely discounted by courts and undermines the argument that reasonable steps were taken.

Privilege does not travel unchanged. Communications with in-house counsel are not protected in European Commission competition proceedings the way they are in the United States, the English position on who counts as "the client" is narrower than many assume, and the rules on using a privileged document disclosed by mistake differ materially between jurisdictions. Do not assume a United States analysis holds for a matter with a European dimension.

We are not a law firm. Correspondence with our personnel does not create an attorney-client relationship and is not privileged.

Links, marks and third-party content

Our materials may link to third-party websites and may reproduce third-party names, logos and marks. Links are for reference. We do not control linked sites, we do not endorse them or their content, and we are not responsible for them. Third-party marks belong to their owners, and their appearance does not indicate affiliation, sponsorship or endorsement in either direction.

Our own names, marks and materials are our property or that of our licensors and may not be used without permission.

We do not include specific project names, capital figures or counterparty identities in this notice. Anything transaction-specific belongs in the project or offering documents that this page says supersede it.

The limits of this notice: governing law and enforceability

To the fullest extent the law permits, and except for fraud, fraudulent misrepresentation, or any liability that cannot lawfully be limited, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, consequential, special or punitive loss, or for loss of profit, revenue, business, opportunity, goodwill or data, arising from the use of our published materials or from any electronic communication.

This notice and our published materials are governed by the law of [GOVERNING LAW STATE] and the federal law of the United States, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules.

We say candidly what that achieves. It records our position. It does not impose a governing law or a forum on you, it is not a submission to any jurisdiction by either of us, and it does not vary the governing-law, venue or dispute-resolution provisions of any agreement between us — those prevail. A statement published on a web page cannot deprive you of the protection of mandatory rules that apply where you live or work, cannot remove your right to bring proceedings before the courts of your own habitual residence where the law gives you one, and cannot stop you complaining to your own supervisory authority. We do not attempt any of that.

A limitation of liability published unilaterally is materially weaker than the same words in a signed agreement. Against someone who has not assented, its function is evidentiary — establishing notice and negating reliance — rather than contractual. It is not a substitute for the equivalent terms in our actual agreements.

If any part of this notice is unenforceable, the rest continues to apply. Our failure to enforce any part is not a waiver. Headings are for convenience.

How this notice fits with our other terms

We publish several documents and they must not contradict each other. Where they overlap, this is the order of precedence, highest first:

1. A signed agreement between us — a non-disclosure agreement, engagement letter, grant agreement, transaction document or data processing agreement. 2. The platform terms you accepted, for anything concerning access to or use of our private platform and the non-public project, capital and partner data held in it. 3. Our privacy notice, for anything concerning personal data. Sections 13 and 14 above summarise it; if they differ, the privacy notice prevails. 4. Our website terms of use, for use of the public site. 5. This notice, for electronic correspondence. 6. Our cookie notice, security policy and published methodology and disclosures each prevail within their own subject matter — including how project figures are compiled, sourced and qualified.

We review these documents together whenever any one of them changes. If you find a contradiction between them, tell us at applied@thecefa.org. That is a defect and we will fix it rather than argue about which document wins.

Language and accessibility

This notice is published in English and the English text governs. Where we publish a translation it is for convenience, and if the two differ the English text prevails as between us — except where the law of your jurisdiction requires otherwise, which in some places it does. Quebec's French language requirements, France's language rules for consumer-facing material and Belgian language rules for employment documents are examples. Where such a rule applies to you it prevails, and we will supply a compliant version on request. Nothing in this paragraph reduces any right you have under the law of your own country, and where local law requires information to be given in a language you understand, that requirement wins.

A notice nobody can read is not notice. We publish this page as structured text that works with screen readers and assistive technology, at a size and contrast meeting recognised accessibility standards, without requiring scripts to read it, and it reflows on small screens. We do not publish it as an image or a scanned document. If you need it in another format — large print, plain text, braille, audio, or a version you can keep offline — write to applied@thecefa.org and we will provide it at no cost. If you find any part of this page, our website or our correspondence inaccessible, tell us and we will fix it and confirm when we have.

Effective date, versions and changes

This notice is version 1.0 and takes effect on [EFFECTIVE DATE].

Because our email signatures point to a live address, version control is part of the notice rather than an afterthought. Every version carries a version number and an effective date at the top of this page. When we change it we publish the new version here and keep the previous version, unaltered, at applied.thecefa.org/disclaimer/archive, with its own permanent address, its effective and superseded dates, and a short note of what changed. We keep archived versions for at least [ARCHIVE RETENTION PERIOD].

The version that applies to a given message is the version in force on the date that message was sent. We do not apply a later version retrospectively to a dispute that has already arisen, and a change to this page does not vary any signed agreement. Material changes are noted on this page for at least ninety days.

We keep the archive for a reason worth stating. A link can be changed by whoever controls it, and that is a fair criticism of any notice delivered by reference rather than in the message itself. The archive is how the text in force on any past date can be established. For high-stakes correspondence we also carry the operative statements — in particular sections 5, 8 and 17 — in the body of the message rather than relying on the link.

Prior versions are available on request from applied@thecefa.org.

How to reach us, and a closing note

General enquiries: applied@thecefa.org. Privacy and data rights: applied@thecefa.org. Security issues and suspected payment fraud: applied@thecefa.org. Impersonation and phishing using our name: applied@thecefa.org. Compliance and anti-corruption reports: applied@thecefa.org. Accessibility: applied@thecefa.org. Legal notices: [LEGAL NOTICE EMAIL] — and note that a legal notice is effective only when delivered in the manner set out in the relevant agreement. Postal correspondence: [FULL POSTAL ADDRESS], for the attention of [ROLE].

If you would rather not correspond by email for any of the reasons in section 17, write to us.

A closing note, and the most important sentence on this page. This is a general notice published for the information of the people we correspond with. It is not legal advice, it is not tailored to your circumstances, and reading it — or corresponding with us — does not create a lawyer-client relationship between you and us or between you and anyone else. Some of what is set out here has real legal force; some of it, as we have said in the sections themselves, has less than the standard email footer implies. If your position turns on any of it, instruct your own counsel on the facts of your own matter. We would encourage that rather than resent it.