10 August 2016

Hedgeweek: MUFG says AIFMs must ensure investors don’t pay for Brexit passporting fall-out

Tim Thornton, COO, MUFG Investor Services has commented that the loss of AIFMD passporting rights that enable UK-based alternative fund managers to market products across the EU has been one of the industry’s main concerns since the Brexit vote.

“Whether the UK retains its existing AIFMD rights or is required to apply through the equivalency process will only become clear as negotiations progress. The latter scenario is much more likely, but given that the regulatory regime in the UK already matches that of the EU, the process of bringing forward the approval of an AIFMD third country passport should be relatively straightforward,” he says.

“If the UK’s regulatory landscape substantially changes, we can expect the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) to take a tougher line on passporting, pushing the UK further down the queue. Any gap in passporting rights could create significant upheaval and high costs for re-routing and restructuring funds. It would also raise questions about pre-existing investors around ongoing marketing, and parallel vehicles may need to be established. A sensible compromise is necessary to avoid increased fragmentation of the industry and costs which investors will ultimately end up bearing.

“The impact on the rest of Europe is potentially disadvantageous. On one hand, a loss of the UK’s passporting rights could encourage mangers to move their European operations to other jurisdictions, which would benefit those locations. On the other hand, should a fund’s primary investor base be the UK, we could see those products re-domiciled to the UK and become unavailable to European investors.  

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