A new authorised fund regime for investing in long term assets: Macfarlanes' response to the FCA consultation paper

We are grateful for the opportunity to review and comment on the FCA’s proposals for the creation of a Long-Term Asset Fund (LTAF). Macfarlanes has been engaged in the thought and discussion around the creation of the LTAF from the earliest stages.

We welcome the FCA’s commitment to making the LTAF a workable alternative for non-professional investors that wish to access private, less liquid, and longer-term assets with a NAV-like investment return. We agree that the LTAF should not be a daily-dealing fund and that the fund must have strong levels of transparency, governance, and investor protection to be right for the target investor base.

However, we have identified several problems in the draft rules that might make it impractical or unattractive for market participants to offer the LTAF to investors. We also propose that there are few risks and many benefits in permitting the LTAF to be available to wealth management clients.

We caution that the ambition for policymakers and for the market should be to get as much of the LTAF framework right first time and to ensure a successful launch that lives up to expectations.

Appended to our consultation response are our considerations about the tax treatment of the LTAF.

View our full response

 

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