ESC: Summary Record of the 12th Meeting of European Securities Committee

10 July 2003




Forum Group on Financial Analysts
The Chair of the Forum Group on Financial Analysts, Ian Macintosh informed delegations about the main findings of the Group and the possible follow-up to the report, focussing among others on the role of securities regulation, mainly the ways of stimulating market integrity consisting in both a top down (Market Abuse Directive, Distance Marketing Directive) and bottom-up approach (Giovannini Report, Forum Group on Financial Analysts)

Market Abuse Directive
A further discussion on the texts will take place in the ESC of 19 September until the vote planned at Members level on 14 October.

Major changes compared to the previous version presented in the ESC meeting of 17 March 2003 are related to the:

  • Definition of 'inside information' (Art. 1): Commission services decided to come back to the reference to the 'reasonable investor' concept.
  • Public disclosure of inside information by issuers (Art. 2 and Art. 3): an explicit reference to the use of 'officially appointed mechanisms' has been now included through Recital 4. For distressed companies, the Commission had not finalised its opinion and was waiting for Member States comments.
  • Market Manipulation (Art. 4 and 5):

    With regard to the document ESC 23/2003 on the Production of recommendations (Art. 2 to 6) the chair explained that credit rating agencies have been kept in the text, in order to respect the consensus found in CESR on this question.

    On the dissemination of recommendations (Art. 7 to 9) the Commission tried to find an acceptable balance for duties potentially applicable to journalists [Art. 8].

    With regard to the document ESC 24/2003 on the ‘buy-back' programmes (Art. 2 to 6), a deadline has been included for reporting of trades to competent authorities or to the public [Art. 4(3)], at 'no later than 1 week', and the wording on Chinese Walls [Art. 6 (2)] has been clarified.

    Extending Lamfalussy
    The Chairman informed delegations that the legislative package prepared by the Commission services in order to extend Lamfalussy structures to banking, insurance and UCITS has been streamlined into one draft Directive covering all three fields and four draft amending Decisions.

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