Publications
& Policy

In this letter, Invest Europe expresses its concerns about the draft RTS under SFDR that were published by the European Supervisory Authorities (ESAs) on 4 February. In particular, we shed light on issues of potential overreach by the ESAs and/or divergence from the Level 1 legislation.

On February 11, Invest Europe hosted a dynamic, online panel discussion among senior industry participants on the CEE region’s dynamic growth potential and opportunities for investors, highlighting recent, successful investment stories (2015 – 2019).

The report offers an in-depth study of private equity’s role in innovation and economic development across Central and Eastern Europe through detailed case studies of companies backed by private equity investors during 2015-2019.

In this consultation response, we have shared our views on the European Commission's Initiative on Sustainable Corporate Governance. Particular areas of focus were directors’ duty of care and due diligence duty. We stressed that while there are a number of good principles behind the idea put forward by the European Commission – such as holding directors accountable for creating real long-term value – it would create significant uncertainties and risks, if directors could be held to account by all different kinds of stakeholders, with no clear prioritisation on how they should weight all the different stakeholders’ interests.

In this response we have expressed our concerns that ESMA has not taken proper account of the differences between the overwhelmingly institutional AIF industry and the retail fund industry, with respect to their respective distribution models. Concretely, ESMA has made some assumptions about the application of MiFID rules in the institutional marketplace which are not necessarily correct. This is particularly relevant in the context of: (i) the categorisation of AIF marketing as a MiFID investment service or activity; and (ii) the disclosure of information on past and expected future performance.

Ahead of the fast approaching application date (10 March 2021), Invest Europe has been in contact with the European Commission to express its concerns about some of the grey areas around SFDR, including the scope of Article 8 and the public disclosures pursuant to Article 10 by private funds.

Becker Friedman institute: PE-owned nursing homes have a lower quality of care than those owned by other types of investors.

"We use competing risks methods to investigate the causal link between venture capital (VC) investments supported by the EIF and the exit prospects and patenting activity of young and innovative firms."

In this consultation response, Invest Europe reiterates that there is no need for a re-opening of the AIFMD because of a variety of factors. In addition, any changes to the AIFMD regime would lead to additional costs and (administrative) burden for the industry as members will need to re-adapt and get to grips with new requirements. If necessary, improvements to the AIFMD regime can be sought via Level 2 or 3 measures, or in the context of other legislative reviews.

Brand new analysis of Venture and Buyout statistics, looking at the transaction value of Venture-backed and Buyout investments.

The European Long Term Investment Funds (ELTIF) framework, if not currently successful, has the potential to become a relevant tool in the future if it appropriately takes into consideration the needs of private equity managers. In this response we detail which changes would increase the take-up of this voluntary retail passport: broadened eligible assets, opening to fund-of-funds and requirements that are more tailored to the specificities of long-term, closed-ended funds.

This document provides the conversion table from Invest Europe sectoral classification to NACE codes.

Over the years EU Risk Finance Guidelines allowed many start-ups and scale-ups to benefit from state aid support. While we note that the current regime is broadly appropriate, we suggest in this response a few changes that could be introduced to the Guidelines to make it easier for innovative companies to be eligible when owned by private equity.

2021 has been a pivotal year for European Deep Tech