What is the Market Abuse Regulation (MAR)?

The **Market Abuse Regulation — Regulation (EU) No 596/2014** protects the integrity of EU financial markets. It prohibits three behaviours: **insider dealing**, the **unlawful disclosure** of inside information, and **market manipulation**. It has applied since **3 July 2016** and replaced the old Market Abuse Directive 2003/6/EC — the shift from a directive to a directly-applicable regulation harmonised the regime EU-wide ^[1].

**Ad-hoc disclosure (Art. 17):** an issuer must disclose inside information directly concerning it **as soon as possible**. A delay is permitted only if all three conditions in Art. 17(4) are met (legitimate interest, no risk of misleading the public, confidentiality ensured) — and the issuer must document the delay ^[1].

**Insider lists (Art. 18):** issuers maintain a continuously updated list of everyone with access to inside information (identity, reason, time of access) and provide it to the supervisor on request; retained at least **five years**. **Managers’ transactions (Art. 19, “directors’ dealings”):** persons discharging managerial responsibilities (PDMRs) and persons closely associated with them notify their own-account transactions. The notification threshold was raised by the EU Listing Act with effect from **4 December 2024 from EUR 5,000 to EUR 20,000 per calendar year** (national supervisors may set it between EUR 10,000 and EUR 50,000). The **closed period** of **30 calendar days** before the announcement of an interim or year-end financial report (Art. 19(11)) is unchanged ^[1][2].

The central concept is in **Art. 7**: inside information is information of a precise nature, not made public, which — if made public — would be likely to have a significant effect on the price of the financial instrument. The prohibitions themselves are in Art. 8 (insider dealing), Art. 10 (unlawful disclosure) and Art. 12 (market manipulation), consolidated in the prohibition provisions Arts. 14 and 15; Art. 9 (legitimate behaviour) and Art. 11 (market soundings) contain safe-harbour mechanisms ^[1].

A common confusion: **MAR does not cover crypto-assets.** It applies to financial instruments traded on EU trading venues. For crypto-assets, **MiCA (Regulation (EU) 2023/1114) created its own market-abuse regime in Title VI (Arts. 86–92)** — with parallel prohibitions on insider dealing, unlawful disclosure and market manipulation, fully applicable since 30 December 2024. The two regimes must be treated separately ^[1][3].

**Regulation (EU) 2024/2809 (the EU Listing Act)** of 23 October 2024 amended, among others, MAR. Most MAR amendments have applied since **4 December 2024** — including the increase of the Art. 19 notification threshold (EUR 5,000 → 20,000) and changes to insider lists and share buy-backs ^[2].

Deferred to **5 June 2026** was the most significant substantive change: the revised disclosure of inside information in **protracted processes** (intermediate steps need no longer be disclosed, only the final event) and the new delayed-disclosure conditions in Art. 17(4). These are now in effect — the consolidated text and any ESMA guidelines should be read against this when implementing ^[2].