THURSDAY OCTOBER 19 2000 OM suffers over failure at exchanges BY MARTIN WALLER AND PAUL ARMSTRONG TWO Nordic stock exchanges operated by OM Gruppen suffered the embarrassment of widespread failures yesterday, on the eve of a crucial vote by London Stock Exchange shareholders. The LSE has made a plank of its defence to OMs hostile offer alleged technical failings of the equipment OM operates, claiming outages which held up dealing 18 times over the same number of months.

The problems yesterday were in Stockholm and Copenhagen, where there were three separate breaks in trading in equities, options and futures and bonds.

The outages lasted between half an hour and almost three hours in one case.

A company spokeswoman confirmed that both cities bourses trade on the same OM system. She blamed problems at a third party supplier of telecoms in Stockholm.

This is our problem because we have to deal with it, she said. It didnt originate from any of our systems.

LSE shareholders are almost certain to reject a motion today that, if passed, would see the Exchanges 4.9 per cent ownership limit lifted automatically once an offer for the LSE was declared unconditional by the Takeover Panel.

The motion, if successful, means that the limit would be retained until a bidder won acceptances for 50.1 per cent of the stock

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,21515,00.html

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), October 18, 2000

Answers

Technical stock exchange problems were becoming common earlier this year. This is the first one, of any consequence, that I've heard about in quite a while now.

-- Billiver (billiver@aol.com), October 19, 2000.