Especially as a young scholar, it's always encouraging to notice that someone actually read your work. I had this pleasure today as the European Commission published a lengthy report evaluating the European Transparency Directive, which contains issuer disclosure rules as well as major share ownership disclosure rules. With respect to the latter, the report also addresses the issues of empty voting and hidden ownership, and refers to the seminal work of Henry Hu & Bernard Black in this area (of course) and also to my own paper (which is available at SSRN).
On empty voting, the authors of the report write that all in all, they "are inclined to recommend a ban on this practice." (I have not yet had the chance to read how this ban should be effectuated).
On hidden ownership, referring to problematic cases involving cash-settled derivatives, the report concludes that "There seems to be a clear case to close the loophole. We thus suggest the implementation of a notification regime."
The report and annexes can be downloaded here. For the European Securities Markets Expert Group (ESME)'s views on the same issues, see post no. 149.
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