Shareholders Rights Directive: Approval of implementing regulation

The new regulation imposes a number of requirements to the chain of intermediaries in order to facilitate the effectiveness of the Shareholder Rights Directive. These include transmission between intermediaries of information regarding shareholder identification, notice of general meetings, confirmation of entitlement of the shareholder to participate in a general meeting, notice of participation, voting receipt and confirmation and other corporate events.

Furthermore, the implementing regulation introduces certain minimum requirements to the formats of messages transmitted between intermediaries, issuers and shareholders e.g. during an identification process in order to ensure efficient and reliable processing and interoperability between these parties and to enhance the transparency and trust – and thus to facilitate the exercise of shareholders’ rights, particularly across borders.

The implementing regulation shall apply from 3 September 2020. You can read the full text of the implementing regulation in the multilingual EU law database here.

At this point, it is not yet clear how the Directive will be implemented on a more practical level – among other things how the chains of intermediaries across countries will work together and the responsibility for establishing common cross country IT systems and standards. VP are proactively participating in and following the implementation and we will keep you updated on the progress.