Brussels, 27/02/2015 (Agence Europe) - MEP Cora van Nieuwenhuizen (ALDE, the Netherlands), the EP's rapporteur for the draft regulation to counter the manipulation of financial benchmarks, was praised by all the shadow rapporteurs in a debate at the EP's economic affairs committee on Thursday 26 February, although a number of issues remain to be settled.
Czech MEP Ludek Niedermayer, the EPP's shadow rapporteur, praised the way Van Nieuwenhuizen dealt with the question of proportionality and countries outside the EU. He mentioned a few wording issues to be sorted out over the next few days, for compulsory obligations, for example. He said he didn't like the line being taken by the Council on proportionality, noting that he was more on the rapporteur's side here. On behalf of the S&D group, Spanish MEP Jonas Fernandez also sided with the rapporteur against the Council's position. He said one would need to try and get a closer look at the requirements to be introduced for non-critical benchmarks such as those compiled from data supplied by voluntary (and therefore unsupervised) contributors. He said the non-EU ('third country') system should also cover non-supervised bodies and called for a greater role for ESMA.
Belgium's Sander Loones, speaking on behalf of Kay Swinburne for the ECR group, said that commodity benchmarks should not be covered by this particular regulation but rather by other legislation, pointing out the regulation on abuse of the market (MAR).
Philippe Lamberts (Greens/EFA, Belgium) was surprised that a liberal rapporteur left it for national authorities to decide what is and isn't critical because this could lead to different rules in different member states and therefore distortion. He said that ESMA should be given the power to take over the supervision of a benchmark, for instance LIBOR, if it felt that national supervision was not always adequate.
The European Commission expressed concern that according to certain amendments, non-critical benchmarks would not respond to the same principles as critical benchmarks. Accepting the question of proportionality, it added that the general principles had to be maintained for any type of benchmark and that commodity benchmarks were covered by the IOSCO principles that the Commission had followed when drawing up the draft legislation. The EP's economic committee is scheduled to vote on the report on 9 March. (Élodie Lamer)