Global Financial Market Watch : Global Financial Lawyer & Attorney : K&L Gates Law Firm : Government Enforcement, Investment Management

On Monday, March 15, 2010, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-CT) released a Chairman's Mark of the Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010. The Bill, which has been in development for months, is intended to replace the Discussion Draft previously circulated by Chairman Dodd on November 10, 2009 and is different in many respects from H.R. 4173, the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2009, which was passed by the House on December 12, 2009. The Senate Banking Committee is scheduled to begin marking up the legislation on March 22.

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By: Philip J. Morgan

The UK remains at the forefront of international efforts to regulate bank pay practices. On 10th March 2010, the UK Treasury published draft new rules that, if they remain in their current form, will require the annual public disclosure by large banks and building societies of an "executives' remuneration report." See
http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/fin_bill_draftregulations.htm

The new rules would, amongst other things, require the annual disclosure of the number of employees within pay bands starting at £500,000 to £1,000,000. They would only apply to a bank (including any associated company providing services to the bank) with more than 1000 employees provided that the bank (either alone or together with its corporate group members where most of the group's activities are financial services activities) also has more than £100 billion of assets on its balance sheet.
 

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By: Kay A. Gordon, Dr. Wilhelm Hartung, Cary J. Meer, Philip J. Morgan, Mark D. Perlow, Neil Nick Robson, Richard Guidice, Jr

Changes in the regulatory approach to the short selling of listed securities have recently been announced in both the United States (U.S.) and the European Union (EU). In the U.S., rule amendments were recently adopted by the Securities and Exchange Commission that generally restrict market participants' ability to sell short listed securities whose price has dropped by at least 10% in a single day. In the EU, a new regulatory proposal would (to the extent adopted by the EU member states) require private disclosure of net short positions above a 0.2% threshold to the applicable regulator, and public disclosure to the market of such positions above a 0.5% threshold. We summarize in this alert what these changes entail and what each will mean for market participants.

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By: Catherine S. Bardsley, Mark J. Duggan, John J. Nestico, David Pickle, William A. Schmidt, William P. Wade, Kristina M. Zanotti.

The U.S. Department of Labor (“DOL”) has issued a new proposed regulation (the “Proposal”) in the most recent installment of its ongoing efforts to implement the statutory exemption for participant advice added to ERISA and the Internal Revenue Code as part of the Pension Protection Act of 2006 (“PPA”). The Proposal, which deals solely with advice to plan participants (as opposed to plan sponsors), would replace the final regulation and related class exemption regarding participant advice that was issued in January 2009. Notably, the Proposal would cut back significantly on what would have been permitted under that regulation and class exemption, particularly as it would have applied to advice to IRAs.

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