Article 40
Additional requirements in relation to placing
1.
Investment firms placing financial instruments shall establish, implement and maintain effective arrangements to prevent recommendations on placing from being inappropriately influenced by any existing or future relationships.
2.
Investment firms shall establish, implement and maintain effective internal arrangements to prevent or manage conflicts of interests that arise where persons responsible for providing services to the firm's investment clients are directly involved in decisions about recommendations to the issuer client on allocation.
3.
Investment firms shall not accept any third-party payments or benefits unless such payments or benefits comply with the inducements requirements laid down in Article 24 of Directive 2014/65/EU. In particular, the following practices shall be considered not compliant with those requirements and shall therefore be considered not acceptable:
(a)
an allocation made to incentivise the payment of disproportionately high fees for unrelated services provided by the investment firm (‘laddering’), such as disproportionately high fees or commissions paid by an investment client, or disproportionately high volumes of business at normal levels of commission provided by the investment client as a compensation for receiving an allocation of the issue;
(b)
an allocation made to a senior executive or a corporate officer of an existing or potential issuer client, in consideration for the future or past award of corporate finance business (‘spinning’);
(c)
an allocation that is expressly or implicitly conditional on the receipt of future orders or the purchase of any other service from the investment firm by an investment client, or any entity of which the investor is a corporate officer.
4.
Investment firms shall establish, implement and maintain an allocation policy that sets out the process for developing allocation recommendations. The allocation policy shall be provided to the issuer client before agreeing to undertake any placing services. The policy shall set out relevant information that is available at that stage, about the proposed allocation methodology for the issue.
5.
Investment firms shall involve the issuer client in discussions about the placing process in order for the firm to be able to understand and take into account the client's interests and objectives. The investment firm shall obtain the issuer client's agreement to its proposed allocation per type of client for the transaction in accordance with the allocation policy.