The French Financial Markets Authority has published its response to the European Commission’s public consultation on revising the Shareholder Rights Directive, backing the review as a chance to strengthen harmonisation of shareholder rights and issuer-shareholder relations across the European Union. Its central message is that the directive should remove the many national options still left to member states, which the authority says are a major source of fragmentation and make the effective exercise of shareholder rights more difficult, especially in cross-border settings. Drawing on consultations with issuers, investors, intermediaries and central securities depositories in the Paris market, the authority highlighted problems caused by intermediary chains operating under different national legal regimes, particularly for transmitting information ahead of general meetings and for voting. It proposed a stricter framework for meeting formats, supporting hybrid general meetings with live remote voting, suggesting that closed-door meetings excluding effective shareholder participation could be prohibited, and calling for fully virtual meetings to be regulated, including through regular shareholder input. It also called for measures to make rights easier to exercise, including an EU-wide standard document to prove shareholder status at the record date, tighter harmonisation of general meeting timetables and voting cutoffs, and an obligation for intermediaries to confirm electronically and without delay that the issuer has effectively taken the vote into account. The response also supports a harmonised and progressive threshold for filing shareholder resolutions based on market capitalisation, broader issuer rights to identify shareholders by removing the option to limit identification to holders above 0.5% of voting rights or capital, and extending identification rights to additional instruments and issuers such as those traded on multilateral trading facilities. In addition, it calls for more specific transparency requirements on shareholder engagement policies and suggests that the revised directive could provide for centralised European Securities and Markets Authority supervision of proxy advisers.
France Autorite des marches financiers2026-07-10
French Financial Markets Authority calls for deeper EU harmonisation in Shareholder Rights Directive review
The French Financial Markets Authority has urged the European Commission to use the Shareholder Rights Directive review to remove national options and further harmonise how shareholder rights are exercised across the European Union. Its proposals cover stricter rules for general meeting formats, standardised cross-border voting and record-date processes, broader shareholder identification rights, stronger engagement transparency and possible European Securities and Markets Authority supervision of proxy advisers.