Commissioner for Regional Policy Corina Crețu and Commissioner for Health and Food Safety Vytenis Andriukaitis have brought together health professionals to kick-start the reflection on future EU investments in health under the 2021-2027 Cohesion Policy programmes. The Commissioners launched a pilot project to improve cross-border emergency services in the Pyrenees between the border regions of France, Spain and the Principality of Andorra. They also announced that health will be this year’s new category for the RegioStars Awards.
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In a case brought by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), Manraj Virdee was sentenced at Southwark Crown Court to a 2 year prison sentence suspended for 2 years and he was further ordered to carry out 300 hours of unpaid work in the community. The sentence followed earlier guilty pleas to 4 charges relating to misleading consumers, fraud and the illegal operation of an unauthorised investment scheme worth over half a million pounds.
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The Financial Stability Board (FSB) published a report on FinTech and market structure in financial services. The publication is part of the FSB’s ongoing work to monitor FinTech market developments and their potential implications for financial stability. The FSB defines FinTech as technology-enabled innovation in financial services that could result in new business models, applications, processes or products with an associated material effect on the provision of financial services.
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The European Central Bank (ECB) has launched a sensitivity analysis of liquidity risk to assess the ability of the banks it directly supervises to handle idiosyncratic liquidity shocks. The exercise will constitute the supervisory stress test of 2019. The results of the exercise will feed into the ECB’s ongoing supervisory assessments of banks’ liquidity risk management frameworks, including the Supervisory Review and Evaluation Process (SREP). However, the outcome of the stress test will not affect supervisory capital and liquidity requirements in a mechanical way.
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The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed insider trading charges against a former senior attorney at Apple whose duties included executing the company’s insider trading compliance efforts. The SEC’s complaint alleges that Gene Daniel Levoff, an attorney who previously served as Apple’s global head of corporate law and corporate secretary, received confidential information about Apple’s quarterly earnings announcements in his role on a committee of senior executives who reviewed the company’s draft earnings materials prior to their public dissemination.

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The Financial Stability Board (FSB) today published the Global Monitoring Report on Non-Bank Financial Intermediation 2018. The report presents the results of the FSB’s eighth annual monitoring exercise that assesses global trends and risks from non-bank financial intermediation. It covers data up to end-2017 from 29 jurisdictions, which together represent over 80% of global GDP.
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The number of significant institutions that will be directly supervised by the European Central Bank (ECB) from 1 January 2019 stands at 119 following the annual review of significance and ad hoc assessments. The changes in significance statuses are the result of new group structures, license withdrawals, mergers and other developments. Several large banking groups have also relocated their activities to the euro area. This has increased the overall complexity and size of directly supervised banks.
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Author: Dina-Perla Portnaar

I sat across a director of an executive search and leadership company, talking about secure base leadership, unleashing the individual’s potential, changing the minds of the top leaders of the country and more, when he looked at me in a daring way and said: “I read so many books with theories on culture, human behavior, risks, failures and successes. In the end, the key differentiator which will lead to success is not EQ or SQ, but IQ”. This man was trying to challenge me and question the psychological-spiritual backbone I built up in the past six years. It made me think of the target-oriented, corporate, driven and masculine professional I used to be. A large part of me longed for the ‘simplicity’ of that existence, talking and acting in secular ways and focusing on knowledge, competences and skills more than anything else. Another part of me screamed: who are you kidding? You know, it is the combination that makes a difference, both short-term and long-term.

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The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is warning investors to be vigilant to the threat posed by investment scammers, as data from Action Fraud reveals over £197 million1 of reported losses in 2018. Victims were scammed out of over £29,000 on average last year, as fraudsters employed increasingly sophisticated tactics to persuade victims to invest.
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by Daan Lunsingh Scheurleer

On January 29th, 2019, a bill introducing a collective damages action on an opt-out basis for persons domiciled in the Netherlands was adopted by the lower house of Dutch Parliament. The bill will now be submitted to the upper house for approval. If approved, the bill may come in to force and effect on July 1st, 2019 at the earliest. However, this would require a rather swift approval process and January 1st, 2020, seems to be the more likely effective date. Under the current collective litigation regime, no monetary damages can be sought on a collective basis. The essence of the bill is that this restriction will be removed, so that a group action for monetary damages is possible. At the same time, the bar is raised for collective claims in order to achieve a fair and balanced system, which provides a higher level of finality for defendants. Under the new regime, finality is also increased by making a court ruling awarding or denying the collective relief sought binding on the individual members of the group, whereas under the current regime, there is no such binding effect. Continue reading…