Regulatory expertise at Linklaters spans numerous practice areas and industry sectors. Over many years, the firm has built up close relationships with regulatory authorities across the world.
Linklaters’ financial regulation experts advise on existing and prospective legislation affecting banks and financial institutions across Europe, the Middle East, the Americas and the Asia Pacific region, as well as on the rules of regulatory organisations and central bank practice, including capital adequacy rules. The group created the firm’s Blue Flag® product suite for clients in the financial services industry. This provides regulatory compliance information on conducting international business, including regulatory, funds and shareholding disclosure and covering around forty jurisdictions across Europe, Asia and the Americas.
Clients across the globe benefit from the financial markets group’s regular series of briefings, a discussion forum uniting legal and compliance professionals from major financial institutions. These provide information about global legal and regulatory developments and their impact on clients’ businesses.
Linklaters’ regulatory service to clients also extends to a global group of corporate governance experts. They guide multinationals through all stages of the company life cycle and its jurisdictional regulatory requirements. Such requirements increasingly include environmental regulatory risk assessment and the disposal of distribution businesses in the regulated sector.
The energy and utilities sector sits alongside industries such as insurance, infrastructure and construction, telecommunications and transport and logistics as an area in which Linklaters’ regulatory expertise and resources are crucial to clients. The firm’s knowledge of existing requirements and anticipated developments in these sectors ensures that financings appropriately reflect their regulatory and commercial environment. Here again, Linklaters’ banking and capital markets teams have a wealth of experience of dealing with listing authorities and regulators.
Competition work is central to Linklaters’ regulatory practice in all industries. The firm is a pre-eminent advisor on compliance work and has a successful track record of challenging the decisions of competition and regulatory authorities around the world.
Recent regulatory transactions include advising:
- JPMorgan Chase on the acquisition and integration into its environmental markets business of Climate Care, a pioneer offset business in carbon emission reductions. This included extensive due diligence of the carbon company’s credit portfolio, considerable structuring advice and regulatory risk assessment
- A consortium of leading investment banks on the creation of a pan-European equities trading platform
- European Commission on its Phase II investigation into the EPS ethylene pipeline venture
