Deferral of portfolio holdings regime welcomed

Key elements of the investment community have welcomed a Federal Government announcement that it will be deferring for 12 months the implementation of its portfolio holdings disclosure regime.

The Australian Private Equity and Venture Capital Association Limited (AVCAL) said it supported the deferral announced by the Minister for Finance and Acting Assistant Treasurer, Senator Mathias Cormann.

AVCAL chief executive Yasser El-Ansary said the decision would give the industry time to prepare and help provide much-needed market certainty.

"The proposed new disclosure framework would not have delivered more meaningful information to superannuation fund members — instead, fund members would have been subjected to volumes of immaterial information that would only have served to confuse them," he said.

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He claimed that with any new disclosure framework, it was critical that a balance was struck between providing more information, as against providing too much information that turns people away from trying to engage in understanding what it all means.

Explaining his organisation's opposition to the regime, El-Ansary said: "For private equity and venture capital funds, these rules are the equivalent of asking the vendor of a property to tell everyone what their reserve price is before the start of an auction".

"There's a reason why vendors don't do that — it doesn't help them to realise the best market price for their asset," he said.