1. Investment firms placing financial instruments shall establish, implement and maintain effective arrangements to prevent recommendations on placing from being inappropriately influenced by any existing or future relationships.

2. Investment firms shall establish, implement and maintain effective internal arrangements to prevent or manage conflicts of interests that arise where persons responsible for providing services to the firm's investment clients are directly involved in decisions about recommendations to the issuer client on allocation.

3. Investment firms shall not accept any third-party payments or benefits unless such payments or benefits comply with rules made by the FCA under FSMA which were relied on by the United Kingdom immediately before IP completion day to implement the inducements requirements laid down in Article 24 of Directive 2014/65/EU. In particular, the following practices shall be considered not compliant with those requirements and shall therefore be considered not acceptable:

(a) an allocation made to incentivise the payment of disproportionately high fees for unrelated services provided by the investment firm ('laddering'), such as disproportionately high fees or commissions paid by an investment client, or disproportionately high volumes of business at normal levels of commission provided by the investment client as a compensation for receiving an allocation of the issue;