Brexit: Euroclear confirms holding company move from London to Brussels

The tax residence and domicile of the clearing house will move to the Belgian capital later this year

Brexit has put the future ability of UK-based financial firms to operate across the European Union and eurozone in doubt (AP)

Euroclear, the financial clearing house, has confirmed it is shifting the residence of its holding company from the UK to Brussels due to Brexit.

The tax residence and domicile of the holding company of the Brussels-headquartered group, which underwrites trades between large financial firms, will also transfer to the Belgian capital later this year.

Brexit has put the future ability of UK-based financial firms to operate across the EU and eurozone in doubt and some firms are taking pre-emptive action in case access ends up being withdrawn.

“We want to redomicile the topco to the eurozone. It will be in Belgium as it’s where most of our business operations are. We are preparing to launch a transfer of arrangement sometime after the summer,” Lieve Mostrey, Euroclear’s chief executive told the Financial Times.

“For the type of company we are, we feel more comfortable in the eurozone,” she added.

Last month Euroclear outlined plans to establish operations in Dublin, to enable the firm to continue to support the settlement of Irish corporate securities after Brexit.

Euroclear was founded in 1968 to settle trades in the nascent eurobond market (designed to tap large firms’ offshore foreign currency bank balances) and today holds around €29 trillion of clients’ assets.

Clearing houses are positioned between the two parties involved in a financial transaction and effectively safeguard completion of a deal even if one side goes bust.

Another London-based clearing house, LCH, part of the London Stock Exchange, is the EU’s biggest clearing house for euro-denominated transactions.

Research from EY in 2016 suggested that forcing euro clearing out of the City could result in up to 83,000 job losses in London over the next seven years.

A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that the headquarters of Euroclear, rather than the holding company, was moving from the UK to Belgium