NEWS

Tom Van Dyck
+32 475 90 90 91
t.vandyck@liedekerke.com

Freya Mareels 
+32 475 25 11 50
f.mareels@liedekerke.com

Wim Dedecker
+32 491 36 03 99
w.dedecker@liedekerke.com

The FSMA publishes a Q&A about the impact of COVID-19 on the obligations of listed companies

The Q&A is intended:

• To recapitulate the positions taken in the FSMA’s press release of 26 March 2020 and, where necessary, to provide further details;
• In light of the provisions of Royal Decree No. 4, to sum up a number of points that the FSMA considers require attention.

During the coronavirus, and combined with the increased limit for contactless payments, the use of non-contact payments has doubled compared to last year.

In light of the guarantee scheme, banks have to date granted corporate loans more than 115,000 times deferred. In total, this concerns an underlying credit volume of 17 billion euros or an average of 145,000 per credit with companies.

In the meantime, the guarantee scheme has also been activated for all new loans and credit lines with a maximum term of 12 months. The first figures show that in April, banks extended more than 17,000 new loans to companies (with and without a state guarantee) amounting to just over 4 billion euros.

The European Investment Bank (EIB) and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) have signed a landmark advisory agreement to collaborate on the development of innovative financing schemes to support vaccines development across the globe.

Under this partnership delivered through the InnovFin Advisory programme, the EIB will provide strategic financial advice and support to CEPI and its members (private and public companies and research institutes) on potential financing solutions from the EIB Group and/or external financing options. The goal is to deploy large-scale vaccine development projects, making such solutions more readily available around the world.

EIOPA publishes weekly information for Relevant Risk Free Interest Rate Term Structures and Symmetric Adjustment to Equity Risk with reference to 27 April 2020

As a result of the COVID-19 outbreak, EIOPA will carry out extraordinary calculations on a weekly basis to monitor the evolution of the relevant risk-free interest rate term structures (RFR) and the symmetric adjustment to equity risk (EDA).

The information will be published on a specific area of the website created for this purpose both for RFR and EDA named “Extraordinary weekly updates”.
 
The aim is to support insurance and reinsurance undertakings in the monitoring of their solvency and financial position.