The EU Council adopted by written procedure on Thursday 3 December its conclusions setting out the EU Council’s priorities among the measures set out in the Commission’s Action Plan (see EUROPE 12562/9) to speed up the establishment of the Capital Markets Union (CMU).
The text calls for a clear prioritisation of measures, giving the “highest priority” to actions that improve the funding of the economy and have the potential to support a swift economic recovery in the context of Covid-19 pandemic. According to the Member States, these measures should all be implemented by the Commission as soon as possible, but at the latest by the end of 2021.
In particular, Member States support the proposed measures to facilitate access to capital market financing for businesses, especially SMEs, and to support insurers, banks and other institutional investors to invest more in EU companies.
Among these measures, the text encourages the Commission to focus on those that can be carried out by non-legislative means and that can help channel savings to capital markets without risking financial stability, market integrity or consumer protection.
The EU Council also considers that the measures considered most important for the mobilisation of private capital should also be implemented “as soon as possible”. In this respect, the text specifically mentions the streamlining of existing disclosure rules for different capital market products and the examination of the advantages and disadvantages of a possible readjustment of the current categorisation of investors.
Finally, the text invites the Commission to look at “more complex and time consuming structural reforms” and, in particular, to assess ways to simplify the withholding tax relief procedure for cross-border investments as well as ways to increase convergence of the outcome of insolvency procedures in Member States.
See text: https://bit.ly/3qqQZ4o (Original version in French by Marion Fontana)