The Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board has filed a proposed rule change with the Securities and Exchange Commission that on July 1 would terminate its CDINet system, which accepted and disseminated issuers' material-event notices.
In a notice issued Friday, the MSRB asked issuers that use CDINet to instead file their material-event notices, beginning today, with a continuing disclosure pilot program being conducted on EMMA, the board's Electronic Municipal Market Access system.
The board plans to replace CDINet with EMMA, which is to begin full operations July 1.
The CDINet system has been little used by issuers. The SEC's Rule 15c2-12 on disclosure has given issuers the option of filing material-event notices with either the nationally recognized municipal securities information repositories or the MSRB. Most issuers chose to file the notices with the repositories initially and, later, with the Central Post Office facility, which passed them on to the NRMSIRs in a uniform manner.
But on July 1, under changes to Rule 15c2-12, EMMA is to take the place of the repositories and the CPO, which has been operated by the Municipal Advisory Council of Texas.
The board said in its notice that it "urges, but does not require, submitters currently using the MSRB's CDINet in connection with their material-event notice filings to instead make submissions on or after June 1, 2009, to the continuing disclosure pilot, solely in electronic format, until such time as all submissions must be made to the permanent EMMA continuing disclosure service beginning on July 1, 2009."
However, the board added that it "takes no position with regard to whether a submission made to the continuing disclosure pilot that is made publicly available through the EMMA Web portal would satisfy any other provisions of existing continuing disclosure undertakings," a reference to issuers' continuing disclosure contracts with issuers.
