European Financial and Corporate Law Centre

Director: Jane Welch


The aim of the European Financial and Corporate Law Centre (EFCLC) is to provide an informed, independent forum for research and debate on European financial services and company law, drawing on expertise in the British Institute of International and Comparative Law in the fields of European Law, competition law, comparative law, private international law. The EFCLC subsumes the work of the Institute's European Company Law Centre, which completed an extremely successful three year research programme at the end of 2005, under the direction of Professor Jonathan Rickford CBE.

The specific objectives of the EFCLC are to:

  • Clarify the increasingly complex maze of legislative measures affecting financial institutions operating in the EU. Banks, investment firms and insurance companies are subject to a wide range of "vertical" and "horizontal" directives, supplemented by further layers of secondary legislation
  • Explore ambiguities in drafting EU legislation and follow through the interpretation and implementation in the UK and other Member States
  • Identify and analyse possible conflicts between European legislation and Community Law
  • Analyse the remaining obstacles to the establishment of a genuine Single Market in Financial Services
  • Explore the impact of EU legislation on non-EU institutions and monitor the EU/US regulatory dialogue

Work Programme

December 2006 saw the publication of the second report on "Comparative Implementation of EU Directives", produced for the City of London. The second report dealt with the implementation of the EU Second Money Laundering Directive in the UK, Spain, Italy, Greece, Poland and Lithuania.

The first report - on the comparative implementation of key provisions of the Insider Dealing Directive and the Market Abuse Directive - was published by the City of London at the end of 2005. That report covered the UK, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands and was presented by Jane Welch and the other authors at a workshop organised by the City Corporation in Brussels in March 2005, attended by officials from the European Commission, the European Parliament and Member State Permanent Representations, together with representatives of relevant trade associations.

The Institute was asked by the European Parliament in the summer of 2006 to produce a comparative report on the regulation of life insurance companies in the UK, Ireland, Germany and Spain. The report was produced by Jane Welch with the assistance of a team of national rapporteurs. It was completed early in 2007 and submitted to the Parliament. It is not a public document.

Events

The EFCLC organised and cooperated in a number of events in 2006, including a one day conference on the implementation of the Takeover Directive with speakers from the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Sweden in May 2006. The Director-General of the Takeover Panel gave the keynote address.

A workshop on "The Law on Secured Transactions: The Need for Reform", with speakers from UNCITRAL, the EBRD, UNIDROIT and the Law Commission, was held at the end of May 2006.

In October 2006, Monty Raphael of Peters & Peters gave a talk on "Recovering Stolen State Assets and the Proceeds of Grand Corruption". In December 2006, a seminar was held on "Cross-Border Abuse: Investigations and Prosecution", sponsored by Omni Bridgeway. The last two events formed part of a series of lectures and seminars by the Institute on the subject of "State Jurisdiction in a Global Environment: Rethinking Extraterritorality". The series is being sponsored by Clifford Chance and will continue in 2007.

Future Work

The EFCLC is undertaking research into the legal and regulatory implications of transatlantic exchange mergers. Resources permitting, we would also like to look at other research topics in the area of financial services and markets, including the following:

  • Achieving legal certainty in the regulation of retail financial services: establishing which rules apply to financial institutions providing cross-border services to consumers and which Member State is responsible for regulating them
  • The impact of the implementation of the Directive on Markets in Financial Instruments (MiFID) on investment services and financial markets in the EU

For more information on the work of the EFCLC, please contact j.welch@biicl.org.