The World Centre’s Recent Work

The World Centre has been closely involved with the “encouraging financial participation in the EU 27″ project in 2011 and hosted the UK workshop for the project. Its aim is to spread employee share ownership among small and medium sized enterprises to cure problems such as succession planning and employee attraction.

Recently, the Centre has played an important role in the various Employee share ownership/Financial Participation studies and reports undertaken by the European Commission in the decade 2000-10. However, it became apparent that broad-based employee share ownership was beginning to slide down the agenda of the Commission and of the European Parliament.

The Centre fiercely opposed the arrival of the Prospectus Directive, mainly because it did not exempt all employee share plan sponsors from the arduous task of having to issue a prospectus every time international companies wanted to award incentive-based equity to employees working within EU member states. Centre staff, backed by leading practitioner members, such as Shearman & Sterling LLP, went to Paris to argue our case before the Committee of European Securities Regulators. European subsidiaries of US companies have suffered from the PD prospectus requirement if their stock is/was not traded on any major European exchange. An unedifying tussle then developed between the Commission and the secretariat of the Council of Ministers over whether the reform of the Prospectus Directive should introduce exemption for all employee equity awards, not only for listed (public) companies, but privately held companies too.