Professor Ventoruzzo to publish book on EU insider trading regulation with Oxford University Press

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – Penn State Law professor Marco Ventoruzzo, together with Sebastian Mock, a German legal scholar, has received a contract to publish a book with Oxford University Press on insider trading regulation in Europe in a comparative perspective. Ventoruzzo and Mock will edit the publication and contribute several chapters.

The purpose of the book is to produce an analytical commentary, article by article, of the EU Regulation on Market Abuse, entered into effect in June in Europe. Methodologically, the goal of the editors and authors is to combine the continental European tradition of doctrinal commentaries offering a detailed interpretation of the rules with a strong attention to the practical implications for lawyers, courts, and regulators; with policy and reform perspectives, also with an interdisciplinary view, more typical of U.S. and Anglo-Saxon legal scholarship. Contributors will include prominent European and American scholars and practitioners.

The new European rules confirm the “parity of information approach” to insider trading that characterizes European jurisdictions, and that was adopted in the U.S. in the 1960s, but soon abandoned in favor of a more complex, and sometimes contradictory, approach based on elusive concepts such as fiduciary duties and the misappropriation theory. Important innovations include a new regulation of “market sounding” (the process through which issuers and offerors of securities test the water soliciting investors’ interest in the financial products they intend to sell), and an attempt to avoid the risk of double jeopardy when the same conducts are sanctioned with both administrative or civil sanctions, and criminal sanctions, a problem that has recently been addressed by the European Court of Human Rights, and by the Supreme Court in the U.S. in the 1980s.

Ventoruzzo has written extensively in the area of securities regulation and, in particular, on insider trading. His proposals were cited in The New York Times with respect to the need to simplify the convoluted and uncertain U.S. case law on the subject, and some of his papers on insider trading can be downloaded free-of-charge online.