It provides for principles which, in CESR’s view, contribute to achieve the harmonisation of the institutional oversight systems in Europe. In particular, it contains a definition of enforcement standards on financial information, their scope, the selection techniques applicable by the enforcers and the responsibility of different parties involved. A peer review with regard to Standard No.1 was finalised in August 2006.

 

The Review Panel set up an ad-hoc group, coordinated by Mr Didier Niclaes from the Belgian CBFA, which has been in charge of conducting this self-assessment and peer review.

 

The peer review shows that:

 

• less than half the 29 Member States fully applied Standard No. 1 on financial information, and 6% of the membership either did not apply this standard or did not contribute to the review;

• in contrast, more than half of the jurisdictions self-assessed as having fully implemented the standard;

• concerning the effort made since the work undertaken in 2006, it should be noted that eight Member States were assessed as fully implementing in 2006, and five further countries were peer reviewed with this result in 2008 ;

• the number of three non-contributing Member States and one not-applying Member State in this work-stream is relatively high;

• except for Principle 5, all Principles taken individually have been fully applied by slightly more than 69% of the Member States; and

• from the seven jurisdictions which partially implemented Standard No.1 in the 2006 peer review, only one jurisdiction has been upgraded to a fully implemented status.