Securities market operator PLUS Markets Group has renewed its bid to trade all of AIM’s 1,700 companies before the year is out by means of its agreement with the Munich Stock Exchange to create a new Pan-European capital market, PLUS Europe. The London Stock Exchange dismisses the agreement as ‘an elaborate attempt at regulatory arbitrage’, but Simon Brickles, chief executive of PLUS Markets and former head of AIM, declares: ‘PLUS intends to be trading all AIM stocks by the beginning of 2009.’

The agreement is as yet non-binding, but Munich’s Bayerische Borse AG has the authority under the EU’s Mifid rules to provide an acceptable regulatory environment to trade AIM companies. Brickles says ‘a formal agreement with Munich will give PLUS the opportunity to introduce trading in all AIM stocks at a stroke.

‘It will replace the current need for PLUS to secure the individual agreement of AIM firms and will provide new competition.’ At present, PLUS trades many fully listed LSE companies, but only a minority of AIM counters, because of the cumbersome process of obtaining an AIM company’s prior approval, which is not needed for fully listed LSE companies.

The UK authorities have grasped this point and a process is under way to change the rules, but it is proving a distinctly protracted process. The LSE suggests the Munich agreement ‘tries to circumvent the wishes of AIM companies’ and says ‘LSE members trading in AIM securities are required to report AIM trades to the Exchange, under our rules and regulatory oversight’.