Press release, November 28, 2007
OMX to introduce national OAM in Helsinki
On December 17, 2007, OMX Nordic Exchange Helsinki will introduce the Officially
Appointed Mechanism (OAM) for the central storage of regulated information in
Finland responding to the objectives of the European Union's Transparency
Directive. All regulated information of listed companies, as prescribed by law,
will be archived in the central storage. The Finnish Securities Market Act has
appointed OMX Nordic Exchange Helsinki to maintain the national central storage.
The European Union's Transparency Directive took effect in February 2007.
According to the directive, each member country must appoint national storage to
which issuers of shares operating in the area of the European Union must file
their regulated information, including prospectuses, interim reports, financial
statements, profit warnings and information dealing with changes in ownership.
In Finland, the requirements of the Transparency Directive are taken into
account in the Securities Market Act, which obliges OMX Nordic Exchange Helsinki
to act as a national storage.
In Finland, the obligation to deliver regulated information to the storage
applies to listed companies in the OMX Nordic Exchange Helsinki and companies
domiciled in Finland of which securities are subject to trading in another
country of the European Economic Area.
Published information must be delivered to the storage with their original
attachments and different language versions in the same form as they were
published in the market. Listed companies can either use an external service
provider that automatically delivers the information to the national storage, or
they deliver the information manually to the storage as long as the delivery
takes place at the same time when the information is published.
The legal obligation to deliver information to the national storage does not
remove the obligation of listed companies to publish information as usual since
delivering information to the national storage is not the same as informing the
market.
The regulated information in the national storage are published in real-time on
the Internet at www.tiedotevarasto.com and www.OAM.fi, where the public can view
them for at least five years, free-of-charge. At the moment, the websites have
editions in Finnish, Swedish, English and Lithuanian.
As of 1 January 2008, the storage (www.tiedotevarasto.com) website will also
include the regulated information of Lithuanian companies, since OMX is also
responsible for the national storage in Lithuania. However, local Financial
Supervision Authorities are responsible for the national storage in Sweden and
Denmark. The objective is to connect the national storage for regulated
information with the European Central Storage Mechanism in 2010.
For further information, please contact:
Jarmo Holopainen, Communications, OMX Nordic Exchange Helsinki +358 9 6166 7203
About OMX | OMX is a leading expert in the exchange industry. The OMX Nordic
Exchange comprises over 800 companies including its alternative market First
North. OMX provides technology to over 60 exchanges, clearing organizations and
central securities depositories in over 50 countries. The Nordic Exchange is not
a legal entity but describes the common offering from OMX exchanges in Helsinki,
Copenhagen, Stockholm, Iceland, Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius. OMX is a Nordic
Large Cap company in the Financials sector on the OMX Nordic Exchange. For more
information please visit www.omxgroup.com.
