Acting chiefly through its Corporate Finance Committee, AMAFI is keeping close tabs on work being done to revise the Prospectus Directive. Following a legislative process that resulted in the publication in June of the new Prospectus Regulation, some of whose provisions are already applicable even if the bulk of the regulation will not come into effect until 20 July 2019, ESMA is now taking the lead on this matter. At the start of the summer, it published three consultation papers on Level 2 measures that it plans to propose to the European Commission. The consultations, which close at the end of September, cover the format and content of the prospectus, prospectus scrutiny and approval, and the EU growth prospectus, which is a break-through innovation under the new regulation aimed at making it easier for smaller firms to access market financing.

AMAFI submitted some mainly technical observations about ESMA’s proposed implementing provisions. Generally speaking, however, the desire to streamline the content and, by extension, the cost of prospectuses in some cases (not only for SMEs but also, for example, for secondary issues) and the introduction of a universal registration document modelled closely on the French registration document are welcome innovations within the framework of the Capital Markets Union initiative (AMAFI / 17-61).