Further updating the Corporate &Financial Weekly Digest edition of December 8, 2017, as of January 8, there were still only 14 European Union (EU) Member States (i.e., only 50 percent of the EU) that have fully transposed the revised Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II) into their national law (as reported on the European Commission’s (EC) MiFID II Transposition Status Webpage).

Under EU law, European directives have to be implemented into each country’s national law before it is binding on market participants in that jurisdiction. MiFID II was supposed to have been implemented in full into national legislation before July 3, 2017—a full six months before MiFID II was to have taken effect on January 3, 2018.

The MiFID II Transposition Status Webpage states that as of January 8, only partial transposition measures have been communicated to the EC by Lithuania, Luxembourg, Portugal, Spain and Sweden, while transposition measures still have not been communicated to the EC at all by nine Member States, including the Netherlands, Poland and Greece, among others.

Consequently, infringement proceedings have been launched by the EC against 19 Member States, including Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, for their lack or delay of notification of national transposition measures or their incompleteness.

A link to the EC’s MiFID II Transposition Status Webpage is available here.

Further commentary on the practical impact of EU Member States not fully implementing MiFID II can be viewed here in an interview of Katten partner, Neil Robson, on CNBC Europe’s ‘Squawk Box’ program which aired on January 5.