INTERNATIONAL: AIMA Announces New Policy Platform

Wednesday February 25 2009

The Alternate Investment Management Association (AIMA) has today, 24th February 2009, has announced a major new transparency initiative. The initiative will support the principle of full transparency and supervisory disclosure of systematically significant positions and risk exposures by hedge funds managers to their national regulators.

This initiative is one of a series of policy positions in the association’s new platform. AIMA is currently representing the hedge fund industry in global discussions about its regulatory framework, notably with the organisations tasked by the G-20 to address the issue, such as IOSCO and the Financial Stability Forum. AIMA is also working closely with national regulators regarding the supervision of hedge fund managers.

AIMA’s new platform policies are:

Regular reporting and increased transparency of systemically significant positions and risk exposures by managers of large hedge funds to their national regulators (the regulator of the jurisdiction in which the manager is authorised and registered to operate).

1. Regular reporting and increased transparency of systemically significant positions and risk exposures by managers of large hedge funds to their national regulators (the regulator of the jurisdiction in which the manager is authorised and registered to operate).

2. An aggregated short position disclosure regime to national regulators.

3. Support for new policies to reduce settlement failure (including in the area of naked short selling).

4. Support for a global manager-authorisation and supervision template based on the UK’s FSA model.

5. A call for unified global standards for the industry based on the convergence of existing industry standards work, such as that authored by AIMA, HFSB, IOSCO, PWG and MFA.

Andrew Baker, Chief Executive of AIMA, said, “We want to dispel once and for all this misconception that the hedge fund industry is opaque and uncooperative. That’s why we are declaring our support for the principle of full transparency of systemically significant positions and risk exposures by hedge fund managers to their national regulators through a regular reporting framework.”

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