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Northern Ireland Protocol: agreement in principle The co-chairs of the EU-UK Joint Committee stated that, following their meeting on 8 December 2020, agreement in principle had been reached on the outstanding issues in relation to the implementation of the Withdrawal Agreement and the Northern Ireland Pr...

The UK retakes control of financial services equivalence A number of equivalence decisions in respect of EEA member states have been laid in Parliament this week. The full list and further details are available here. By way of reminder: equivalence is, in short: an autonomous mechanism by which one jurisdiction...

Singapore Mediation Convention to enter force: a new world for cross-border mediation? This Saturday, 12 September, the Singapore Mediation Convention (also known as the United Nations Convention on International Settlement Agreements Resulting from Mediation) will enter force for the first states to have ratified it. The Singapore Mediati...

Prospectus equivalence: it doesn't need to be mutual In the non-binding Political Declaration that accompanied the Withdrawal Agreement, the UK and the EU committed, in relation to their respective financial services regulatory frameworks, to “start assessing equivalence with respect to each other under the...

The course of the UPC never did run smooth: the UK officially withdraws its participation In what has felt like death by a thousand cuts, the UK has officially withdrawn its ratification of the Unified Patent Court Agreements. For our earlier posts on the saga, see our blog posts here and here. The written statement made by IP Minister Am...

No KIDding: the UK prepares to diverge from the EU PRIIPs regime The EU packaged retail and insurance-based investment products (PRIIPs) regulation is a regulatory behemoth overdue a reform. Since January 2018, it has required a manufacturer of a PRIIP to draw up a key investor document (KID) before a PRIIP is made ava...

Back to the future... When I first qualified into tax, UK-UK transfer pricing was not a thing. A UK company could lend money to a fellow UK group company without being required to impute interest on the loan. A UK parent could guarantee the loan of its UK subsidiary without ...

The EU's 'Capital Markets Union' reforms make cross-border securitisations easier. The UK should make similar reforms. The EU continues to press ahead with its Capital Markets Union ('CMU'). The High Level Forum ('HLF') recently published its final report containing 17 sets of recommendations intended to move the CMU towards completion. For each of the sets of recommendat...

Levelling the playing field - The EC's White Paper on foreign subsidies The European Commission recently published a White paper setting out its proposals for measures to address the impact of subsidies from non-EU countries on trade within the EU. For EU Member States the use of such subsidies is already controlled by the EU...

A brand new subsidy regime for the UK? A key outstanding issue between the EU and the UK in the negotiations on the future partnership agreement is the implementation of a level playing field for competition. The resolution of this issue will likely affect the shape of any future domestic subs...