Welcome to the October 2024 edition of In the Know, Baker McKenzie's Leveraged Finance newsletter that analyzes significant trends and salient legal issues for participants in leveraged finance and high-yield markets around the globe.
On 8 October 2024, the Council of the European Union ("Council") adopted the EU Listing Act ("Act"), a legislative package aimed at making EU public capital markets more attractive and more accessible to EU companies of all sizes by enacting targeted refinements to the current capital markets ecosystem as opposed to wholesale reform. In this edition, we will take a closer look at the specific amendments and assess the Act's likely impact.
Key takeaways
- Reforms to the Prospectus Regulation expand the exemptions for secondary issuances and simplify disclosure with the EU Follow-On Prospectus and the EU Growth issuance document.
- New rules concerning the harmonization of equity prospectuses' layout, format and contents are introduced, while the prescriptive rules around ordering risk factors by materiality will be relaxed.
- Immediate disclosure of inside information under the Market Abuse Regulation (Regulation (EU) No 596/2014) ("MAR") rules will no longer apply to intermediate steps in protracted processes.
- Investment firms will be permitted to re-bundle payments for execution services and research, provided certain transparency and conflict of interest disclosures are made.
- A new directive will be introduced to harmonize rules on listings by companies with multiple-voting share structures while also incorporating shareholder protection mechanisms.
* Andrey Ivanov, Trainee Solicitor and Lisa Nielsen Board, Senior Knowledge Lawyer contributed to this article.