On December 17, 2007, OMX Nordic Exchange Helsinki will introduce the Officially Appointed Mechanism (OAM) for the central storage of regulated information in Finland responding to the objectives of the European Union’s Transparency Directive. All regulated information of listed companies, as prescribed by law, will be archived in the central storage. The Finnish Securities Market Act has appointed OMX Nordic Exchange Helsinki to maintain the national central storage.
The European Union’s Transparency Directive took effect in February 2007. According to the directive, each member country must appoint national storage to which issuers of shares operating in the area of the European Union must file their regulated information, including prospectuses, interim reports, financial statements, profit warnings and information dealing with changes in ownership. In Finland, the requirements of the Transparency Directive are taken into account in the Securities Market Act, which obliges OMX Nordic Exchange Helsinki to act as a national storage.
In Finland, the obligation to deliver regulated information to the storage applies to listed companies in the OMX Nordic Exchange Helsinki and companies domiciled in Finland of which securities are subject to trading in another country of the European Economic Area.
Published information must be delivered to the storage with their original attachments and different language versions in the same form as they were published in the market. Listed companies can either use an external service provider that automatically delivers the information to the national storage, or they deliver the information manually to the storage as long as the delivery takes place at the same time when the information is published.
The legal obligation to deliver information to the national storage does not remove the obligation of listed companies to publish information as usual since delivering information to the national storage is not the same as informing the market.
The regulated information in the national storage are published in real-time on the Internet at www.tiedotevarasto.com and www.OAM.fi, where the public can view them for at least five years, free-of-charge. At the moment, the websites have editions in Finnish, Swedish, English and Lithuanian.
As of 1 January 2008, the storage (www.tiedotevarasto.com) website will also include the regulated information of Lithuanian companies, since OMX is also responsible for the national storage in Lithuania. However, local Financial Supervision Authorities are responsible for the national storage in Sweden and Denmark. The objective is to connect the national storage for regulated information with the European Central Storage Mechanism in 2010.
About OMX
OMX is a leading expert in the exchange industry. The OMX Nordic Exchange comprises over 800 companies including its alternative market First North. OMX provides technology to over 60 exchanges, clearing organizations and central securities depositories in over 50 countries. The Nordic Exchange is not a legal entity but describes the common offering from OMX exchanges in Helsinki, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Iceland, Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius. OMX is a Nordic Large Cap company in the Financials sector on the OMX Nordic Exchange. For more information please visit www.omxgroup.com.
