THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION,

Having regard to the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union,

Having regard to Directive 2004/109/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 15 December 2004 on the harmonisation of transparency requirements in relation to information about issuers whose securities are admitted to trading on a regulated market and amending Directive 2001/34/EC [OJ L 390, 31.12.2004, p. 38.], and in particular Article 4(7) thereof,

Whereas:

(1) Directive 2004/109/EC requires issuers whose securities are admitted to trading on a regulated market to make public their annual financial reports.

(2) Issuers should prepare their entire annual financial reports in the Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML) format. XHTML does not require specific mechanisms to be rendered in a human-readable format. As a non-proprietary electronic reporting format, XHTML is freely usable.