The Commission has announced its intention to amend certain elements of the draft Technical Standards published by ESMA in March 2017. The Commission says it cannot adopt 2 of the 6 RTS & ITS submitted by ESMA in March 2017 – i.e. RTS on the details of reports to be reported to TRs + ITS on format and frequency of the reports to TRs.The reason is they contain references to “endorsements by ESMA” of potential upcoming LEI & UTI industry standards, which according to the draft letter from the Commission remains their prerogative. Based on the draft letter from the Commission, ESMA will have an initial six week period to respond to these proposals and due to the potentially substantive nature of some of these changes, we would expect the final Technical Standards including these amendments to enter a full three month scrutiny period. This means that we would now not expect to see the full Article 4 reporting provisions to come into force until the end of January 2019 at the earliest, with the 12 month tier reporting obligations 12 months thereafter. The full text of the Commission’s draft letter and accompanying text may be found here:
