Norway’s oil fund calls for urgent reform of European capital markets

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The world’s largest sovereign wealth fund is calling for urgent reform of Europe’s capital markets including harmonised tax, insolvency and supervisory rules to ensure the continent does not fall further behind the US and Asia in competitiveness.

Norway’s $1.9tn oil fund is the biggest single owner of European assets, owning on average 2.5 per cent of every listed company on the continent.

But the share of European equities in its total assets has fallen from 26 per cent to 15 per cent in the past decade, mainly because of what it says is falling competitiveness compared with US stock markets and some Asian bourses.

“A well-functioning market in Europe is very important to us . . . It feels like there’s a sense of urgency right now [among policymakers]. We feel it too, and we’re happy about that,” Malin Norberg, chief of market strategies at the fund, told the Financial Times.

The fund will this week send a response to the European Commission’s consultation on capital markets integration, arguing it should be more ambitious and address deeper structural problems hurting the continent and its multiple national markets.

“We share the concern that European markets over time have fallen behind in terms of business dynamism and the provision of new investment opportunities to institutional investors,” the letter says.

“Key barriers include national securities laws, corporate laws, and insolvency regimes that vary significantly across member states.”

The fund, whose biggest holdings in Europe include SAP, ASML, Novo Nordisk, Nestlé and UBS, listed areas where it wanted to see action.

These included fewer national differences in securities and corporate law and insolvency regimes across Europe; harmonisation of tax regimes, especially for withholding tax; and streamlining of debt issuance.

It said liquidity for European equities should be improved through competition and innovation, not regulation, and that supervision should be unified at a European level.

Norwegian politicians cut the fund’s relative exposure to Europe and boosted its US allocation in 2012, but it still remains “overweight” on the continent.

However, the fund’s executives said a bigger factor behind the drop in European investments had been structural issues such as fewer listed companies in the region.

Performance relative to US equities has been another issue. US shares now account for 40 per cent of its assets, compared with 21 per cent a decade ago.

“We have seen over the last years that the number of European companies that we’ve been able to invest in has dropped, and also the relative AUM [assets under management] size that we have in Europe has also gone down quite significantly,” said Emil Framnes, the fund’s global head of equity trading.

European technology companies such as Spotify and Klarna have listed or are planning to list in the US, while groups such as Linde, CRH and Arm Holdings moved their listings there in recent years.

The number of European companies owned by the fund has fallen by a quarter in the past decade to 1,546.

Data visualisation by Aditi Bhandari