"First Quotation Board" at Open Market will be closed soon by German Stock exchange – Investor relations consultancy financial re-lations GmbH supports foreign issuers

Frankfurt, February 21, 2012. The Frankfurt Stock Exchange closes the "Open Market - First Quotation Board" segment for equity securities. The possibility of listing a company had been ended already back in December 2011. The final closing will take effect around Q3 of 2012. Therefore, companies listed on the First Quotation Board are urged to take action quickly.
The First Quotation Board of the Open Market has been an unregulated segment with no transparency requirements to the issuer following the initial listing. No prospectus was required for listings in the First Quotation Board if the listing was done in combination with a private placement to institutional investors. As a result, particularly smaller foreign issuers with a limited or small number of investors have been using this Open Market segment as a cost-effective listing opportunity.
But the suspicion of market-manipulation in the First Quotation Board had led the German Stock Exchange to the decision to change the rules of listing.
According to the plans now announced by the German Stock Exchange, in order not to be delisted, shares must be upgraded to a higher segment (such as the Entry Standard, the General Standard or the Prime Standard). As a result, a public offering including a prospec-tus will be mandatory in the future. Issuers who fail or refuse to do so will have their shares delisted and their trading in the segment will be stopped. In this case, most likely there will not be any compensation for the holders of these shares.
Jörn Gleisner, managing director of Investor and Public Relations consultancy financial relations GmbH in Frankfurt, Germany, comments: "Until the final closure, issuers of the First Quotation Board have the time to meet the requirements for a switch to the more tightly regulated segments." Therefore, financial relations GmbH recommends that issuers who have their shares traded on the Open Market First Quotation Board decide on their respective optimal course of ac-tion as soon and quickly as possible. If they do not, they could suffer from a sell-off dynamic and a resulting share price crash.
Switching to the Entry Standard segment is bound to the following regulatory requirements: Issuers have to publish relevant corporate news and facts that could influence the share price immediately on their Internet site; and they have to present an audited annual and half-year report in a corporate portrait to be updated annually and to include an up-to-date financial calendar.
Affected by these far-reaching measures are about 450 corporations currently listed on the First Quotation Board of the Frankfurt Stock Ex-change, among them predominantly issuers from Germany, Canada, England, Switzerland, and the US.
Regarding these pressing problems, financial relations can assist you to answer your questions and find solutions concerning a delisting or the switching process to a new market segment. If you are interested in solving your problems professionally, please contact us. Please re-fer directly to Jörn Gleisner, Managing Director, and call +49 69 959083 20.

About fr financial relations GmbH
fr financial relations GmbH is a leading public and investor relations agency based in Frankfurt and specialised in corporate, economic and financial communication. The expert team of fr financial relations GmbH has managed more than 100 different capi-tal market and corporate communications projects in the last 20 years. That includes communication for IPOs, capital increases and M&A activities as well as consulting services for corporate financing and the entire corporate communications spectrum. As a leading communication specialist, fr financial relations GmbH provides access to a network of international contacts besides a complete service range in the public relations field. In addition, fr financial relations GmbH is a founding member of the European-wide expert co-operation FINANCIAL-NETWORK.EU and with CCG USA it has founded an international joint venture which is one of the largest providers of fi-nancial communications in the World with branch offices in New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, Tel Aviv, Hong Kong, Peking, Shanghai, and Frankfurt.

fr financial relations Gmbh
Jörn Gleisner
Gutleutstraße 75
60329 Frankfurt
+49 (0)69/ 95 90 83 -20
+49 (0)69/ 95 90 83 -99
info ( @ ) financial-relations dot de
www.financial-relations.de

This release was published on openPR.