In this short post, we will review the news from a couple of weeks ago that Fitch Ratings, the third member of the Credit Rating Agency oligopoly, has been fined by the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) for breaching its conflict of interest-related rules, specifically with regards to its ownership. Fitch Ratings is the third member of the rating oligopoly and, like S&P is not a public company. Therefore, its ownership structure is a little more opaque and difficult to accurately determine. We know that the firm is owned by the influential Hearst Group, but only after the Group increased its stake in the agency at the expense of previous majority shareholder, French conglomerate Fimalac , in 2014. It is in relation to the ownership of Fimalac that this current regulatory action relates. Yet, whilst most CRA-related transgressive behaviour revolves around weighted bias – weighted in relation to the power dynamics within the rating industry and its connection t...

In today’s short post we will look at the news recently that important players within the financial marketplace are jostling for position with regards to the sale of a company that specialises in providing particular information to the financial world. The emergence of NewsCorp and the so-called ‘Big Three’ credit rating agencies as potential purchasers of Acuris suggest that this is a potentially important sale. However, the question for this brief post is whether the sale acts as an indicator for a much larger, and much more important sentiment. Acuris, formerly the Mergermarket Group, is a ‘ media company ’ that specialises in providing financial information to the marketplace. More specifically, it has been noted for its excellence in providing information on Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A) to its subscriber base. Although its current owners BC Partners only purchased the company in 2013 for £382 million including debt, it is now widely rumoured that the company is for...