European Parliament Members Voice Concern to ESMA over MiFID II RTS

The European Parliament's MiFID II/MiFIR negotiating team addressed a letter to the European Securities and Markets Authority ("ESMA") regarding the concerns of Members of the European Parliament ("MEPs") about the Regulatory Technical Standards ("RTS") that are under preparation.

The Parliamentary Team considered the following five areas of the RTS to be problematic: (i) position limits for commodity derivatives, (ii) the ancillary activity test, (iii) non-equity transparency, (iv) Central Counterparty access and (v) tick sizes.

MEPs urged ESMA to revise its language on those issues in order to ensure that there will be no future objections from the Parliament once the RTS are submitted to the European Commission.

ESMA is expected to submit its final draft to the European Commission at the end of September 2015. Once the draft is submitted, the European Commission will have three months to endorse the RTS.

See: ECON Letter to ESMA on MiFID RTS.