Vida FatemiClare Cole, Director of Market Oversight at FCA, has delivered a speech about developments since the UK Listing Review and the next steps for reform. Highlights include:
- In December, FCA set out detailed proposals for reforms to the UK listing regime to encourage a more diverse range of companies to list and grow, while promoting more investment opportunities for investors. This also contained the first tranche of the initial draft UKLR sourcebook provisions. FCA will publish the second tranche of draft rules later in Q1 2024;
- FCA aims to address the sources of friction and inefficiency in the listing rules through its proposals to:
- replace the ‘Premium’ and ‘Standard’ listing segments into a new, consolidated, single category for commercial companies;
- reshape the significant transactions regime to no longer require burdensome FCA-approved circulars and prior shareholder approval of transactions below reverse takeover levels;
- rationalise the related party transaction regime similarly to remove prescribed shareholder votes; and
- alleviate sunset clauses on dual class shares structures, and enable a wider range of pre-IPO participants to hold such shares in issuers post-IPO;
- FCA is considering proposed revisions to the UK’s prospectus and public offering infrastructure to make it easier to raise capital, following the publication of six Engagement Papers last year;
- FCA is re-branding and re-launching the National Storage Mechanism, its online archive of 3.9 million items of regulatory information, to make it more user friendly and to help investors make informed decisions.