UK-based leisure group Rank, which owns the Hard Rock Café chain, announced that it will delist from Nasdaq and end its registration with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

They will, however, continue to trade on the London Stock Exchange. In order to untangle itself from US exchanges, it will change its Articles of Association so that US investors will have to transfer their shares in its ordinary stock.

By taking these measures, Rank will no longer have to comply with either the Sarbanes-Oxley Act requirement to prove adequate supervision of accounting practices or with SEC reporting requirements.

The costs of complying with these requirements are the reason Rank gave for its decision to delist.

According to a study published in June by a law firm in Chicago showed that in the past year, the costs for a large company maintaining a public listing in the United States went up by 45 percent.

Most of that rise in cost, according to the study, comes from rising accounting fees. Audit fees increased by 55 percent for large companies in the past year, according to the study.

Small companies, defined as those companies with less than $1 billion in annual revenues, have seen their audit fees rise even more, up 96 percent in the past year.