11 November 2009 News

 

Thomson Reuters responds to EC investigation

Thomson Reuters has confirmed that on November 3 it received a questionnaire from the European Commission relating to the use of Reuters Instrument Code.

In a statement the company said "Thomson Reuters provides its customers with consistent, dependable and convenient access to millions of financial instruments from almost every electronic trading venue around the world and a vast number of other sources of valuable high quality content. Thomson Reuters data is reliably and consistently identified by a managed code, which we create and maintain to enable navigation of the company's global content. Our customers are at the heart of our business and we continue to work with them to explore how best to add value to our data services. Thomson Reuters will fully cooperate with the European Commission's investigation which is at a preliminary stage."

The anti-trust proceedings brought against Thomson Reuters by the EC concern a potential infringement of the EC Treaty's rules on abuse of a dominant market position Article 82, in particular whether customers or competitors are prevented from translating Reuters Instrument Codes to alternative identification codes of other data feed suppliers to the detriment of competition.

At the time of the merger between Thomson and Reuters in April 2008, competition commissioner Neelie Kroes had said: "The merging parties have offered a remedies package that provides strong safeguards that users of financial data will not be harmed by this major consolidation." A spokesperson for the Commission said that it would not have been able to investigate the RIC issue at that time as its investigation was solely confined to issues of overlap driven by the merger. He went on to say that the timing of the current investigation was likely to have resulted from the EC finding sufficient material to believe an investigation in RICs was now warranted.