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The language of the Issue Memorandum is English: Difference between revisions
The language of the Issue Memorandum is English (view source)
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Look, we can giggle at those well-meaning Belgian jobsworths, hell-bent, with their [[KIID]]s, on demystifying all the manifold arcana of capital markets prospectusry — but not even the haughtiest Eurocrat could be ''that'' pedantic.<ref>A glance at the Prospectus Directive confirms this: Art 27(2) requires offer documents to be drawn up in an official language but, Europeans presumably having the intelligence to at least recognise their own mother tongue, one need not disclose what that language is.</ref> | Look, we can giggle at those well-meaning Belgian jobsworths, hell-bent, with their [[KIID]]s, on demystifying all the manifold arcana of capital markets prospectusry — but not even the haughtiest Eurocrat could be ''that'' pedantic.<ref>A glance at the Prospectus Directive confirms this: Art 27(2) requires offer documents to be drawn up in an official language but, Europeans presumably having the intelligence to at least recognise their own mother tongue, one need not disclose what that language is.</ref> | ||
Could one, over the weft and warp of a two-hundred and seventy pages prospectus, really be in any doubt as to what language it was written in? Could a reader really carry on thinking, “well, this ''looks'' like English, but there remains an outside chance it is Bulgarian”? | |||
Or is it an ''admission''? There are lengthy stretches of any securities offering which, for all the sense they make to a reasonably educated Brit, may as well be in Swahili. Is this [[rider]] there to assure the reader no, she is ''not'' seeing things, this really is intended, with a straight face, as informational content, in English, for a reasonably seasoned prospective investor? | Or is it an ''admission''? There are lengthy stretches of any securities offering which, for all the sense they make to a reasonably educated Brit, may as well be in Swahili. Is this [[rider]] there to assure the reader no, she is ''not'' seeing things, this really is intended, with a straight face, as informational content, in English, for a reasonably seasoned prospective investor? | ||
There is, in any case, a [[paradox]] at work here. Even so simple a sentence requires | There is, in any case, a [[paradox]] at work here. Even so simple a sentence as this — from our learned friends, you will hardly find a simpler one — requires a reader to bring her cultural baggage in from the hall. One of those contains the language she brings to her interpretative task. | ||
Assume it is English. She may crinkle her brow, and think this a statement of the painfully obvious, but will move on, no better equipped to navigate the forthcoming syntactical rapids. | Assume it is English. She may crinkle her brow, and think this a statement of the painfully obvious, but will move on, no better equipped to navigate the forthcoming syntactical rapids. | ||