ECB Opinion Reveals Approach to “Principle of Proportionality” under RRP – in a Manner of Speaking
On 19 April 2013, pursuant to a request from the Austrian Ministry of Finance, the European Central Bank (“ECB”) published an opinion (dated 11 April 2013) on certain draft Austrian recovery and resolution planning (“RRP”) legislation – the draft Banking Intervention and Restructuring Act and associated amendments to the Federal Banking Act and the Financial Market Authority Act (the “Draft Law”).
In general, the ECB welcomed the Draft Law, but commented, amongst other things that it:
- does not contain the resolution tools required by Title IV of the EU Recovery and Resolution Directive (“RRD”); and
- requires credit institutions (“CIs”) to prepare and submit resolution plans to the Austrian Financial Market Authority (“FMA”), rather than make this a responsibility of the FMA itself.
On the principle of Proportionality, the ECB noted that the Draft Law provides for a complete exemption from a CI’s obligations to submit an RRP if that CI’s insolvency can be presumed not to have any material adverse impact on the financial markets, on other CIs or on funding conditions. The ECB considers that Article 4 of the RRD does not allow such a complete exclusion, providing only for simplified obligations for certain less systemically important CIs. Furthermore, the ECB itself remains of the view that it is perfectly possible to make all CI’s subject to RRP legislation, whilst merely simplifying RRP requirements for smaller CIs. Nonetheless, the ECB acknowledges the ongoing discussions within Europe on the subject of enabling Member States to waive the requirement to maintain and update RRPs in certain cases and understands the benefit in avoiding overburdening small CIs. As such, it recommends that any such exemption is granted only under “very strict conditions in accordance with the proportionality principle of the RRD”.
Not very helpful advice, given the admission that the proportionality principle of the RRD does not permit a full exemption. The net result is that there is still no answer to the question as to whether a non-systemically important bank will be able to benefit from a complete exemption from RRP legislation.