At a plenary session in Strasbourg on Tuesday 16 January, the European Parliament approved the revision of the MiFIR Regulation (518 votes in favour, 46 against and 34 abstentions) governing the powers of financial market supervisory authorities, and the MiFID II Directive (521 votes in favour, 19 against and 57 abstentions) laying down usage rules for financial instruments for investors (see EUROPE 13212/14).
With these new amendments, the European Union’s financial authorities will have to put in place a ‘consolidated tapes’ system to enable a centralised flow of financial data at EU level in order to avoid the dispersal of information on financial transactions across different platforms, such as stock exchanges or investment banks.
In particular, this system will aim to provide more transparent supply and demand prices and transaction volumes for financial assets at EU level. In this way, it hopes to make its market more attractive to investors and drive forward the Capital Markets Union project (see EUROPE 13261/15).
During a plenary debate on Monday 15 January, several MEPs called on their colleagues to vote in favour of these amendments. Starting with the rapporteur, Danuta Maria Hübner (EPP, Polish), who stressed the urgent need to combat “the fragmentation of the European capital markets union” and felt that the new rules would help boost European competitiveness.
“The once vibrant landscape of initial public offerings (IPOs) now stands at less than half the size of new listings in the United States. The value of the US stock market in relation to GDP is almost twice that of the EU”, she said by way of comparison.
However, a number of left-wing MEPs, such as Mr Gusmão (The Left, Portuguese) and Mr Gruffat (Greens/EFA, French), judged the text to be insufficient in terms of combating financial speculation within the European Union.
Links to the amendments to the MIFIR Regulation: https://aeur.eu/f/aef ; and to the MiFID II Directive: https://aeur.eu/f/aeg (Original version in French by Bernard Denuit)