The EACB welcomes the opportunity to provide its comments to the European Supervisory and Markets Authority (ESMA) proposed draft regulatory technical standards for the establishment of an EU code of conduct for issuer-sponsored research. The EACB is generally supportive of ESMA’S work in this area, however we believe the below issues require further attention:
- The obligation in Clause 7 section 1. a) of the CoC “to share the agreement between the issuer and the issuer-sponsored research provider to investment firms” should not be made available to investment firms as a whole, but only to the extent necessary to assess compliance, for reasons of bank secrecy duty. Same applies to Clause 3 Section 2 e) of the CoC “include information on the client relationship between the issuer and the issuer-sponsored research provider to issuer-sponsored research”.
- While we agree that only when the issuer paid fully for the research, it should be made accessible to the public, we believe that a more detailed definition for "fully paid research” is necessary.
See our response for more details.