Laws and Regulations

A recent European Union agreement to crack down on the “wild west” in international crypto markets is “not a threat for the Luxembourg crypto market,” according to a senior official at international fund services firm Apex Group.

Representatives of the European Council and the EU parliament have reached a political agreement on the Markets in Crypto Assets proposal, known as MiCA, which covers issuers of unbacked crypto-assets, and so-called stablecoins, as well as the trading venues and the wallets where crypto-assets are held. 

Five representatives of the financial services sector in Luxembourg have been named as members of working groups and specialist advisory committees of the European Securities and Markets Authority, or Esma. The new composition of the committees was made public on Friday and includes about 200 names.

A new EU law from 2025 will require companies in Europe to accept a future in which their reporting data on sustainability and their ESG impact will be just as important as data on their financial performance. Non-EU companies also will be subject to these requirements. “The landscape is going to change because preparers are going to offer reliable data,” said Patrick de Cambourg, chair of the EU taskforce on sustainability reporting standards.

Europe’s asset management industry on Wednesday called on governments across Europe to take additional actions such as introducing new tax incentives to protect retail investors and savers against inflation. 

Luxembourg’s fund industry supports the introduction in new EU retail finance legislation of more lenient ‘opt-up’ criteria for retail clients that would give them the same status as professional clients. At the same time, it opposes the creation of a new category of semi-professional investors.

The European Council and the European Parliament have taken an important step towards the implementation of a new sustainability reporting system in Europe. It concerns the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, or CSRD, which requires companies to have their reported sustainability information independently verified.

Luxembourg’s financial supervisor CSSF on Monday ordered alternative investment managers to exclusively use a new ePassporting module in its eDesk electronic reporting portal to share notifications for the marketing of investment products registered in the Grand Duchy.

New rules, new details and a new terminology regarding financial sector outsourcing are being introduced by Luxembourg’s financial regulator CSSF with the presentation of its widely discussed ‘circular 22/806’. These changes, with significant consequences for the use of IT and cloud services, bring greater clarity within the  regulatory framework.

Alarmed efforts by European green and microfinance fund providers, led by Dutch firms Triodos and ASN, to get the European Commission to rectify what looks like an omission in its proposed investment fund legislation risk being dismissed as “small beer” and may be overlooked. “We have to keep making noise.”

Members of the European Parliament on Tuesday rejected a proposal by the European Commission to treat nuclear energy and natural gas as sustainable economic activities. If the vote is confirmed by absolute majority in the July 7 plenary meeting, the Commission’s proposal to update the EU taxonomy for sustainable activities will be sent back to the drawing board.