The Central Depository may waive the commissions for listed companies looking to transfer to another depository

The Competition Council (CC) has decided to accept the commitment of the Central Depository to set the commissions charged for transferring to another depository to zero, Bogdan Chiriţoiu, the president of the Competition Council told BURSA. The council has conducted market testing for the aforementioned proposal, which consisted in posting the proposal on the website of the Competition Council, and wait for suggestions and observations from the stock market participants, he said.

Once this stage is complete, the draft decision will be sent to the European Commission (EC), which will review it for a month, said Bogdan Chiriţoiu. If the EC has no objections to this project, the Competition Council will approve it, and he said that he expects the final decision to be passed by the end of this year.

In the beginning of 2011, the Competition Council has launched a probe into the fees charged by the Central Depository when it comes to delivering the shareholder registry to an issuer or to another entity (depository). For example, issuers would be required to pay 5 lei/shareholder if they wanted to transfer the shareholder registry from the Central Depository to another depository. Such a decision could have proven extremely expensive for the issuers with a large number of shares, such as the SIFs, which have between seven and nine million shareholders. However, the fee was lowered a few weeks after it was approved, upon the proposal of the Bucharest Stock Exchange, in the General Shareholder Meeting of the Depository, held in the summer of 2010.