CSSF

Luxembourg’s financial supervisor CSSF this week announced that it, at the end of 2021, presented management company Alter Domus with a fine of 174,000 euro relating to the collapsed Columna Commodities fund. 

This Luxembourg fund, created in 2013, went into liquidation in 2017, a year before the sale of its manager, Luxembourg Fund Partners, or LFP, to Alter Domus. CSSF said the fine was issued on 1 December 2021, more than a year ago.

Luxembourg alternative investment fund manager FundRock, part of the Apex Group, has been given a fine of 45,800 euro by Luxembourg’s financial regulator CSSF because the firm did not properly apply the rules relating to benchmarks.

Luxembourg’s financial supervisor CSSF has said it will start collecting information from firms on their anti money laundering and terrorism financing setups from next Wednesday, 15 February, through its annual industry-wide survey. 

The collective value of Luxembourg investment funds has plunged more than 800 billion euro from record levels reached a year ago as inflation, rising interest rates and the war in Ukraine took their toll on assets domiciled in the grand duchy.

Luxembourg’s financial supervisor CSSF on Thursday published an update to its  Reporting Handbook for investment firms. The update integrates the latest version of the reporting framework designed in recent years by the European Banking Authority and introduces a module for threshold monitoring.

Luxembourg’s financial supervisor CSSF has levied a 22,100 euro fine against alternative investment fund manager Pemberton Asset Management SA after a 2020 inspection found  “failures” in risk management, organisational requirements and supervising delegated activities under Luxembourg’s AIFM law, the regulator announced on Tuesday.

Swissquote Bank Europe has become the first Luxembourg bank to be able to offer depositary services to digital asset investment funds, having obtained CSSF regulatory approval to act as a depositary bank for Luxembourg-domiciled funds along with its status as Vasp, or regulated Virtual ASset Provider.

Luxembourg’s financial supervisors are preparing for tough scrutiny of the annual reports that firms will produce in the coming months. The 2022 reports are required to elaborate in detail on the impact of climate change, on the financial fallout from the Ukraine war and on the effects of inflation and rising interest rates.

Luxembourg branches of investment firms and financial institutions headquartered elsewhere in the European Union from this year onwards will have to ask their auditors to produce an independent report on measures taken to prevent money laundering and the financing of terrorism.

Perhaps the most contentious development in Luxembourg’s fund management ecosystem this year was the order to management firms, issued by supervisor CSSF, to report back on the costs of investment funds and look at becoming more efficient.

Investment fund managers of Ucits funds in Luxembourg, home to about a third of all such funds in Europe, were ordered to review, and if necessary correct, the way they calculate the costs and fees of their investment funds and report back to the CSSF before April 1 next year.