In a letter to the European Commission (EC), the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) identified among its planned work a set of deliverables which could be deprioritised or postponed. This consists of reports from ESMA to the EC under various sectoral legislations as well as one mandated peer review which will be delayed.
For the Central Securities Depositories Regulation (CSDR), ESMA wrote: “There are many reports foreseen in CSDR. However, performing them on an annual basis is of limited use as the underlying parameters do not necessarily change frequently. This has been acknowledged in the CSDR Refit proposal published on 16 March 2022, which suggests lowering the frequency to every two or three years for most reports, and upon the Commission request for the rest. In addition, given the stage of the CSDR review, reports to be published in April 2022 would not have been able to bring any particular added value to the process.”
Under the European Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR), ESMA wrote it “considers that producing [the annual report on the supervisory measures and penalties under EMIR] on a less frequent basis, typically a bi-annual basis, is sufficient to adequately inform the public about measures and penalties imposed under EMIR. The next report covers the period starting from the last report, there will thus be no gap in the information covered.”
For parts of the Securities Financing Transactions Regulation (SFTR), ESMA wrote: SFTR reporting started in July 2020 and following the phase-in foreseen in Level 1, 2022 will be the first full year of SFT reporting. SFTR already included several of the EMIR Refit simplifications of reporting and ESMA understands that the efficiency of reporting should be assessed only after a longer period and that it should be assessed together with the quality of the data.”
For a report expected in July on SFTR fees, ESMA wrote that a different report will be provided: “ESMA is working on an authority-wide project to review its fee funded structure in which the topics of this report will be covered.”
ESMA gave the following reasons: “As part of a wider effort to continually improve efficiency within ESMA, this exercise aims to ensure that resources are appropriately allocated in light of external factors impacting on ESMA’s workload since the publication of the [Annual Work Program last September]. The primary external factors affecting ESMA this year are (i) the financial market impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine; (ii) several ambitious legislative proposals, including the European single access point and the consolidated tape providers; and (iii) overall resource constraints.