The London Stock Exchange and Lehman Brothers today announced plans to create a pan-European MTF (multilateral trading facility) for the execution of non-display orders. The MTF, to be named Baikal, will provide market participants with an unrivalled trading service for European equities, being the first to combine an innovative dark liquidity pool with sophisticated algorithmic trading functionality.

Today marks one year since TradElect, the London Stock Exchange’s electronic trading platform, came into live service for the UK market. This next generation technology platform has provided the market with world-leading system performance. Latency has reduced from 140 to 6 milliseconds and capacity has increased 10-fold since TradElect was introduced. Further significant functional enhancements are planned in the next twelve months to support even greater market participation in the future.

Meridian Petroleum plc, an oil and gas exploration and production company, has today been publicly censured and fined £75,000 for breaches of the AIM Rules between August 2004 and February 2007.

Performance Channels, the London Stock Exchange’s new high speed delivery mechanism for Infolect data delivered over 100 megabyte lines, goes live today. This service ensures that even during the highest peaks in trading activity market data is delivered at industry leading speed.

The London Stock Exchange announced today that KSK Emerging India Energy Fund Limited (“KEF”) has become the fourth Indian firm to float on AIM in the last four weeks. Between them the four new Indian firms have raised an estimated $387 million.

Companies raised a record £23.7 billion through new and further issues on the London Stock Exchange’s markets during May, the most money ever raised on the Exchange’s equity markets in a single month. This was nearly three times the £8.6 billion raised during May 2007 and double the £11.2 billion raised during July 2006, the previous record month.

The average daily number of trades carried out across the equity order books of the London Stock Exchange and Borsa Italiana during May 2008 was 906,913, an increase of 13 per cent on May last year. The average daily value traded during May was £12.7 billion (€16.2 billion), a fall of ten percent on May 2007, but an increase of 11 per cent on April 2008.

EDX London’s Russian IOB Derivatives service enjoyed a record month during May 2008 with more than 1.3 million contracts traded. This was the first time that trading volumes have exceeded 1 million contracts in a single month, exceeding the previous monthly record by 41 per cent. Trading volumes during May were 62 per cent higher than for April, more than double the month-on-month growth rate of 30 per cent for the first four months of the year.

The London Stock Exchange today announces the establishment of a new service to offer equity research on smaller quoted companies. PSQ Analytics, as the venture will be called, will be available to companies on AIM as well as smaller companies on the Main Market, and will provide information that improves investor understanding of their businesses.

In summary, the enlarged Group has delivered an excellent overall performance, reflecting strong organic growth and the merger with Borsa Italiana:

The London Stock Exchange today welcomed its sixth and seventh international companies to the Main Market and PSM in less than four weeks:

So far this calendar year, the average daily number of electronic equity trades carried out on the London Stock Exchange and Borsa Italiana has been 1,076,107, an increase of 43 per cent on the first four months of 2007 and a record for the first four months of a year.