The London Stock Exchange has responded to CESR’s consultation on proposed implementing measures for article 40 of MiFID (admission of financial instruments to trading on regulated markets). We welcome steps taken by MiFID to meet our concerns to earlier draft advice on this issue, but we still believe that there is considerable scope to improve the draft advice. In particular:
- the scope of admission requirements should be limited solely to matters that relate to financial instruments and therefore should not extend to historical financial information about the issuer;
- the advice should provide examples of what constitutes adequate verification in relation to the initial disclosure obligation in cases both where a prospectus is and is not required;
- it should be made clear that responsibility for ensuring issuers' compliance with disclosure obligations lies with the competent authority rather than the regulated market;
- the additional requirements for other securities should be made more flexible in order to avoid unintended consequences and to accommodate innovation in regulated markets;
- the advice should not deal with facilitating access to information published on the basis of the prospectus directive as this duplicative;
- the advice should be clarified in order to accommodate depositary receipts; and
- the requirement to take into account the intended trading mechanism should be removed.
The original consultation paper can be found at: www.cesr-eu.org