ESMA yesterday published a letter from the EC’s Director General for Finance Jonathan Faull to his frequent correspondent, ESMA Chairman Steven Maijoor. The letter is a correction to its 18 December 2014 missive, which delineated the amendments necessary to secure the EC’s endorsement of ESMA’s draft RTS on the IRS clearing obligation. The revisions are […]

On 29 January 2015, ESMA released its formal opinion on the draft RTS covering the clearing obligation of interest rate swaps. This is the latest exchange in a ping pong game between ESMA and the European Commission. On 1 October 2014, ESMA originally submitted the draft RTS to the European Commission, but on 18 December […]

The industry’s call for a delay in the margin rules, expected to apply from 1 December 2015, may finally receive a positive response from the regulators[1]. These rules on risk-management of uncleared derivatives will impose collection of Initial Margin (IM) and Variation Margin (VM). The global phase-in timeline was set by the Basel Committee on […]

ESMA have published a letter received yesterday from the EC’s Director General Jonathan Faull, clarifying desired changes to the Clearing RTS. Controversial , and probably unworkable, frontloading obligations will no longer be “backdated”. The letter proposes that frontloading should begin two months after the publication of the RTS for Category 1 clients, and five months […]

As an early Christmas gift to European financial lawyers (and presumably their opticians as well) ESMA has today published a Consultation paper on MiFID II\MiFIR and a Consultation paper Annex B on their respective RTS. In combination, the two papers total 1165 pages, the deadline for submission of responses is 2 March 2015. While the […]

Holland Clearing House (HCH) has been authorised as the second Dutch CCP under EMIR, becoming the 15th CCP to date. HCH acts as the clearer for TOM MTF . As always, the full list is available on the ESMA public register.

To the surprise of no-one, the EC has today confirmed that the QCCP deadline has been extended by six months to 15 June 2015. The extension has been effected by the adoption of an implementing regulation, the text of which remains to be finalised. The press release notes that the extension applies both to EU […]

On Friday, ESMA published the responses it received to the third consultation paper on the clearing obligation under EMIR (ESMA/2014/1185).  The consultation paper outlines the regulatory technical standards (RTS) on foreign-exchange non-deliverable forwards (FX NDF) under Article 5(2) of EMIR. The proposed structure excludes physically settled FX contracts with cash-settled forwards subject to mandatory clearing […]

On 11 November 2014, ESMA published its sixth Q&A (ESMA/2014/1357) on the Alternative Fund Managers Directive (AIFMD).  The latest version provides a brief update on the reporting obligations to national competent authorities under Articles 3, 24 and 42 (Section III).  It also adds a new section on the calculation of the total value of assets […]