Friday September 2 2016

News Source: Global Disclosures

Focus: Major Shareholdings

Type: General

Country: European Union




Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2016/1437 of 19 May 2016 (Regulation) supplementing Directive 2004/109/EC (Transparency Directive) specifying regulatory technical standards on access to regulated information at Union level has recently been published by the European Commission.

The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) shall set up a web portal, the European Electronic Access Point (EEAP), which will enable end users to search for regulated information stored by official appointed mechanisms (OAMs). The web portal shall be accessible through the website of ESMA.

The security and integrity of the metadata on regulated information exchanged between OAMs and the EEAP shall be guaranteed. The EEAP and each OAM shall use the Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) to connect with each other.

The following search criteria shall be offered on the EEAP:

  • the name of the issuers from whom regulated information originated;
  • the unique identifier of issuers as set out in Article 7;
  • the home Member States of the issuer as defined in Article 2(1)(i) of Directive 2004/109/EC;
  • the classification of regulated information as set out in Article 9(2).

The EEAP shall enable end users to search for issuer names in all available language versions of the issuers` names stored by OAMs.

Additionally, the portal shall provide search results in accordance with the search criteria selected by end users. The search results shall be in the form of a list of metadata as laid down in Section A of the Annex to the Regulation.

Each OAM shall use legal entity identifiers (LEI) as the unique identifiers for all issuers, and shall use an Extensible Markup Language (XML) based format to deliver metadata on regulated information to the EEAP.

This Regulation shall enter into force on the 20 September 2016 (20th day following that of its publication in the Official Journal of the EU on 31/08/2016).

However, Articles 7 (Unique identifiers used by OAM’s) and 9 (common list and classification of regulated information) shall apply from 01 January 2017.

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