Cyprus has passed a new law requiring anyone aware of market manipulation or insider trading to have a clear, legally protected route to flag it to the country's financial regulator, with criminal penalties now facing those who try to silence them.
The legislation formally encodes the procedure for reporting actual or suspected violations of the EU's Market Abuse Regulation - known as MAR - to the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission, or CySEC.
The EU framework behind this legislation is not new. The Market Abuse Regulation was adopted back in April 2014, with Article 32 obligating each national regulator to establish dedicated whistleblowing channels.
The European Commission followed up with Implementing Directive 2015/2392 in December of that year, spelling out exactly how those channels should function, who should manage them, and how reporters should be protected. MAR took effect across the EU in July 2016.
Cyprus had already been operating whistleblowing procedures in practice. CySEC issued Circular C488 in February 2022, which introduced formal procedures for receiving market abuse reports and included a dedicated external disclosure form.
That circular, however, carried the force of regulatory guidance, not primary legislation. What changed now is that Cyprus moved those obligations off circulars and into statute, giving the framework the full weight of Cypriot law.
This follows a broader period of intensifying...
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