Brussels, 13/06/2013 (Agence Europe) - The member states' representatives to the European Union, Coreper, reached agreement on Thursday 13 June on updating the MiFID directive (2004/39/EC) on markets for financial instruments.
On 17 June, Coreper will be asked to confirm the agreement after the draft legislation has been given some legal fine-tuning and countries have accepted the deal, explained a source to this newsletter, describing it as a typical European compromise in which each country has to accept that they can't have everything they want. If agreed, the deal will be adopted without debate at the Ecofin Council in Luxembourg on Friday 21 June, which will give the upcoming Lithuanian Presidency of the EU Council of Ministers a mandate to enter into negotiations with the European Parliament. The latter has adopted the Ferber Report submitted by the relevant committee (see EUROPE 10719).
The most recent round of negotiations covered the creation of organised trading facilities (OTF), a new type of trading platform. The United Kingdom has managed to get OTF given permission to trade in shares, which France is unhappy about. France has managed to restrict the facilitating of deals by OTF by forcing them to remain “neutral” for shares, but it wants more transparency and powers to be granted to the European market authority (ESMA).
The updated legislation will provide the opportunity to set limits on commodities holdings. After a transition period, a central register of all types of transactions will have to be set up. (MB/transl.fl)