AMENDMENT TO THE SECURITIES ACT IN INTERDEPARTMENTAL PROCEEDINGS

#67Amendment to the Securities Act in Interdepartmental proceedings

An initiative of the Ministry of Finance of the Slovak Republic (hereinafter referred to as the "Ministry of Finance") is the amendment to Act No. 566/2001 Coll. on securities and investment services and on amendments and additions to certain laws (Securities Act), as amended and amending Act No. 371/2014 Coll. on the resolution of crisis situations on the financial market and on the amendment of certain laws as amended (hereinafter referred to as the "Securities Act"). In the explanatory report of the given amendment, we can find the main goals that the Ministry of Finance wants to achieve:

The first goal of the amendment is to fulfil task C.24. from the Action Plan to combat the legalization of proceeds from criminal activities, the financing of terrorism and the financing of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction with a view to 2024. This task consists in the cooperation between the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of the Interior, and the representative of the Government of the Slovak Republic for the development of civil society in ensuring the supervision of the non-profit sector mainly from the point of view of submitting annual reports and notifying end users of benefits to the registering authority.

The second goal is the implementation of Article 18 of Regulation (EU) 2022/858 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 30 May 2022 on a pilot regime for market infrastructures based on distributed ledger technology and amending Regulations (EU) No 600/2014 and (EU) No 909/2014 and Directive 2014/65/EU. This regulation regulates the so-called DLT technologies, which we can characterize as a distributed database of transactions, that is, we are talking about crypto assets. It is these DLT technologies that will be added to the other financial instruments recognized by the Slovak legal order.

The third objective is to adjust the calculation of annual contributions to the Guarantee Fund and create new alternatives in accordance with current trends, to achieve a balance between the paid contribution of the securities trader and the share in the protected property.

It is stipulated that National Banka of the Slovak Republic may revoke the permit for the provision of investment services if the securities dealer or foreign securities dealer does not start within 12 months from the validity of the permit to carry out investment services or activities or has not provided these investment services during the previous six months or did not perform these investment activities.

Part of the amendment also includes a proposal that financial means of the fund according to Section 91 par. 5 lit. a) of the Securities Act could be used to purchase government securities with a maturity of up to 10 years.