Accueil

The Issuers Group’s priorities in 2009 were to make the arrangements for general meetings more efficient, contribute to European harmonisation projects on corporate actions and general meetings, and analyse the domestic-market impact. All these developments necessitate changes to the information systems and operational processes of corporate trust services. In January 2009, the group reopened the AFTI 2006 study on general meetings and initiated two work programmes.

The first had a legal focus, and in December AFTI was able to co-present with ANSA and AFEP a series of amendments to promote online voting and digitisation of voting slips.

These amendments are expected to be included in the transposition into French law of the Shareholder Rights Directive.

The second work programme was used to prepare a master plan for a proposed marketwide pre-meeting online voting system that meets the expectations of issuers and the industry.

A call for bids will be launched in early 2010 to choose the provider that will operate this service for participants in the voting chain, i.e. transfer agents and account providers.

The Issuers Group also contributed to consultations on general meetings and securities legislation, and took part in working groups set up to determine the procedures for implementing corporate actions standards, which included harmonisation of dates for securities distributions and corporate actions involving reorganisations. It also participated in the working group that analysed the management of French debt. In 2009, a conference was held on the theme of «Corporate Trust and European Harmonisation».

The event was an opportunity to take stock of the impact on these activities and review the outlook at a time of major changes reflecting issuer demands as well as regulatory and European developments.