LSEG to complete divestment of Borsa Italiana Group
London Stock Exchange Group plc (LSEG) confirms that it expects to close the divestment of London Stock Exchange Group Holdings Italia S.p.A. and its business (the “Borsa Italiana Group”) to Euronext for a total cash consideration of €4,443,860,471 today.
As communicated in LSEG’s shareholder circular published on 14 October 2020, LSEG’s intention is to use the net proceeds from the Borsa Italiana Group divestment to repay indebtedness related to the Refinitiv acquisition and for general corporate purposes.
Let’s recall that, on January 29, 2021, LSEG confirmed the completion of its all-share acquisition of Refinitiv.
The deal was finalized shortly after the European Commission approved the deal. The Commission’s investigation focused on trading services for European Governments Bonds (EGBs), where both parties are active, as well as on the provision of financial data products and the provision of trading and clearing services for over-the-counter interest rate derivatives (OTC IRDs), where one party is active upstream of the other in the value chain.
To address the Commission’s competition concerns, LSEG offered the following commitments:
- To divest its 99.9% stake in the Borsa Italiana group, which includes MTS (LSEG’s trading venue for EGBs), to a suitable purchaser. In this regard, on October 9, 2020 LSEG and Euronext signed a definitive and binding sale and purchase agreement. This commitment fully removes the horizontal overlap between the companies’ activities in EGB electronic trading.
- To continue offering its global OTC IRD clearing services performed by LCH Swapclear on an open access basis and to not engage in commercial strategies that would discriminate customers based on the source of their OTC IRD trade submitted to LSEG for clearing.
- To provide access to the LSE venue data, FTSE UK Equity Indices, and WM/R FX Benchmarks to all existing and future downstream competitors. More specifically LSEG commits to not degrade technology, quality or service compared to that provided intragroup. LSEG also commits to maintain an information barrier between the personnel handling sensitive information of LSEG’s customers and Refinitiv’s CRTD and desktop service businesses to ensure that there is no exchange of such information with Refinitiv that could negatively impact third party data vendors.