The reform of the EU market abuse law: Revolution or evolution?

This paper discusses whether the forthcoming reform of market abuse law, as proposed by the EU Commission in October 2011, may be seen as a ‘revolution’ or a mere ‘evolution’. Section 1 explains the topicality of regulating market a buse (ie insider dealing and market manipulation), both in the US and the EU. Section 2 analyses to what extent the transformation of the current Market Abuse Directive into a Regulation and the new Directive on criminal sanctions may be regarded as ‘revolutionary’. Section 3 deals with the substantive changes which seem to be more ‘evolutionary’ in updating and improving some aspects of the previous law. In section 4 we briefly discuss our main concerns with the proposed reform.