Brussels, 31 July 2020 – On 24 July 2020, the European Commission (EC) announced the “Capital Markets Recovery Package”, as part of the its overall coronavirus recovery strategy, aimed at making it easier for capital markets to support European businesses in their recovery from the fallout from the ongoing Covid-19 crisis. To this end the EC proposes changes to capital market rules, including a reduction of investor protection levels.
BETTER FINANCE, as the representative of EU citizens as users of financial services, sympathises with the need for such temporary measures and understands the priority given to ramping up the financing of the real economy. These necessary measures could nevertheless put individual investors further at risk and erode their trust in capital markets once more. It is for this reason that BETTER FINANCE is disappointed by the fact that the recovery package contains nothing to counterbalance this reduction in investor protection, ignoring the very recent recommendations from the European Commission’s own High Level Forum on the Capital Markets Union that could finally provide EU citizens as investors in capital markets with the possibility of remedy in case they suffer from abuse .