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18 J. Priv. Int'l L. 1 (2022)

handle is hein.journals/jrlpil18 and id is 1 raw text is: Journal of Private International Law, 2022 Routled ge Vol. 18, No. 1, 1-27, https://doi.org/10.1080/17441048.2022.2060347 Tayor&anc Croup A new piece in the puzzle of locating financial loss: the ruling in VEB v BP on jurisdiction for collective actions based on deficient investor information Matthias Lehmann* For the first time, the CJEU has ruled in VEB v BP on the court competent for deciding liability suits regarding misinformation on the secondary securities market. Surprisingly, the Court localises the damage resulting from misinformation on the secondary financial markets at a single place, that where the financial instruments in question were listed. This raises the question of how the decision can be squared with earlier cases like Kolassa or Lober and other precedent. It is also unclear how the new ruling applies to special cases like dual listings or electronic trading venues. Furthermore, the judgment is of utmost importance for the jurisdiction over collective actions by postulating that they should not be treated any differently than individual actions, without clarifying what this means in practice. This contribution analyses these questions, puts the judgment in larger context, and discusses its repercussions for future cases. Keywords: Brussels Ia Regulation; Rome II Regulation; place of harm; place of damage; liability for misinforming financial markets; lex mercatus; dual listings; electronic trading venues; collective action; fraud on the market A. The judgment at a glance 1. The background Everybody will remember the 2010 accident on the Deepwater Horizon plat- form, which caused the largest oil spill in history and laid the Southern Coast of the U.S. to waste. Five years later, Vereniging van Effectenbezitters (VEB), a shareholder association registered in the Netherlands, brought a col- lective action in Dutch courts against BP, the oil rig's operator. The claim alleged that BP had provided inaccurate, incomplete, and misleading infor- mation concerning its security and maintenance programmes prior to the oil spill, the extent of the damage and its role and responsibility for the event. *Professor Matthias Lehmann, Institute of European, International and Comparative Law, University of Vienna. Email: matthias.lehmann@univie.ac.at. I am grateful to Paul Eich- muller, Amy Held, Felix Krysa, Fabian Schinerl and Verena Wodniansky-Wildenfeld for reviewing the manuscript. Any errors are of course mine. C 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, trans- formed, or built upon in any way.