Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-06-15-Speech-2-474"
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"en.20100615.29.2-474"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, if I take a little more than four minutes, I will make my concluding remarks shorter so that I do not overrun my six minutes.
Seventhly, the review clause: as with the previous one, this directive will also be reviewed in five years’ time.
My last point is that, in this document, we have the first piece of legislation that has been brought into line with the provisions of the Treaty of Lisbon. Last but not least, allow me to point out that the Chair of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs has managed to ensure that Parliament is given sufficient time. We have three months to respond to the Commission and another extension of three months, if necessary. Having said that, we have undertaken, in the event that all other options fail, to grant early approval, that is, to push this piece of legislation through within the shortest time.
This satisfies all parties.
The Prospectus Directive was originally put together in 2003 with the condition that it be reviewed in September 2009. That has been the case. The Prospectus Directive concerns the completion, approval and publication of prospectuses as a prerequisite for the public offering of securities or their emission into a regulated market within the European Union. In general, the current review concerns technical aspects and is intended to eliminate legal uncertainties and unjustifiably onerous requirements.
First of all, I would very much like to thank all the Members who have worked together with us on this, as well as all the shadow rapporteurs. We have had very good cooperation, and that includes with the Commission. Without such good cooperation, we would not actually have been able to see this package through to a successful conclusion at first reading in less than ten months. I would now like to present briefly the agreement we have forged – and this includes the tripartite talks – in the form of eight principal points on which we were able to reach agreement.
Firstly, one of our objectives was to facilitate access to capital in the market for small and medium-sized enterprises. You know that in the US, there is a much higher percentage of companies, including SMEs, that obtain finance through the market, whereas in Europe, the common practice, especially amongst small businesses, is to obtain finance through bank loans. What we want to do here is open up the opportunity for small businesses to use the market more often than before. We have therefore raised the threshold for exemption from the threshold requirements, which ultimately saddle SMEs with red tape and costs, from EUR 2.5 million to EUR 5 million.
My second point concerns investor protection: we want to make sure that, in the course of such facilitation, we can provide sufficient safeguards to the small private investor. This is why we have raised the threshold for exemption from the prospectus requirements for securities denominated in 50 000 to a denomination of 100 000.
The third point I would like to raise concerns the issue of how to enable employees to participate in a company’s share capital without that company needing to bear the relatively high costs of launching a prospectus. So, this is about relaxing the prospectus requirement when offering employee participation programmes. Here, we have introduced a proportionality clause in that we have eliminated the unnecessary disclosure requirement. At the same time, however, we have made sure that we have a document detailing basic information so that those employees who benefit from this form of participation can have an idea about what it is they are getting. We have also made sure that companies listed in a third country, that is, a country outside the European Union, be exempted from the prospectus requirement as well – just like European companies – where they offer their employees shares, on the condition that they are able to prove equivalence with the disclosure requirements.
The fourth area we discussed and on which we have reached agreement concerns what is commonly known as a ‘prospectus summary’. You can look at it this way: typically, a prospectus is a thick and voluminous document frequently containing several hundred pages. However, there is also the summary which frequently contains another 50, 60 or 70 pages. What we want Parliament to do is to shorten this to what is known as ‘key investor information’ or a document with essential information for investors of the kind provided by traditional investment funds, the UCITS. The Commission did not, in fact, consider this, wanting merely to ensure that key information really is contained in the summary.
We have now agreed that, while keeping the summary in its present form, we should also ensure that it does indeed contain key information which will eventually be set out through directive requirements and a level 2 elaboration. This will help shorten the summary considerably, cutting it down from the current 60, 70 or 80 pages to some 20 or 30, perhaps, and help make it an easy read, especially for the small investor. This is important, because we do not want to leave the small investor out of the picture.
Fifthly, the issue of liability: when a prospectus is drawn up, who is it that guarantees the accuracy of the contents? In particular, if an intermediary uses this prospectus, if he makes arbitrary changes to the contents, then the liable party is the intermediary. The prospectus requirement expires either when the offer period has expired or when the trading has begun, whichever is the later date."@en1
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