In a press release issued on Thursday 22 February, the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) called for the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality to be fully applied in the framework of the reform of the European supervisory architecture and warned against any general increase in the costs of supervision.
At its February plenary session, the Committee adopted an opinion on the reform of the three European financial supervisory authorities (ESA) – ESMA, EBA and EIOPA, which supervise the financial markets and the banking and insurance sectors respectively – proposed by the Commission in September of last year (see EUROPE 11864).
In his report, the rapporteur for the opinion, Daniel Mareels of Belgium, stressed that any change that would transfer some of the costs related to indirect supervision directly to the private sector must take account of budgetary discipline and avoid charging twice.
The Commission is proposing a new system of financing based on three sources: - annual contributions from the financial institutions indirectly supervised by the ESAs; - supervision costs paid by the directly supervised entities; - a balanced contribution from the EU, not exceeding 40% of the total revenue of each authority. In its draft document, the Commission does not set out the precise distribution of the total amount between the various entities, which will be specified in a delegated act.
The financial entities are already contributing, under the current structure, to the resources of the European supervisory authorities, through the contribution of their national supervisory authority, the report explains. The contribution of the financial entities to the national and European supervisory authorities must therefore be redistributed and any general increase in the costs of supervision avoided, he went on to stress.
In so doing, he furthermore considers that any subsequent change should be based on the greatest possible transparency and provide for control mechanisms to be set in place on the overall resources, with such controls to be carried out appropriately by the financial sector. (Original version in French by Marion Fontana)