Regulation No 596/2014 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 16 April 2014 on market abuse and repealing Directive 2003/6/EC and Directives 2003/124/EC, 2003/125/EC and 2004/72/EC

The new rules on market abuse update and strengthen the existing framework to ensure market integrity and investor protection provided by the existing Market Abuse Directive ( 2003/6/EC) which will now be repealed. The Market Abuse Regulation ensures regulation keeps pace with market developments such as the growth of new trading platforms, over the counter (OTC) trading and new technology such as high frequency trading (HFT), strengthens the fight against market abuse across commodity and related derivative markets, explicitly bans the manipulation of benchmarks (such as LIBOR), reinforces the investigative and administrative sanctioning powers of regulators and ensures a single rulebook while reducing, where possible, the administrative burdens on small and medium-sized enterprises issuers.

The Market Abuse Regulation shall enter into application in July 2016. In parallel, the Market Abuse Directive complements the Market Abuse Regulation by requiring Member States to introduce criminal sanctions for the offences of insider dealing and market manipulation where these are committed intentionally.