Having scrutinised the proposal to reform the three European financial supervisory authorities (ESAs: ESMA, EBA and EIOPA), the European Banking Federation (EBF) published a number of comments and recommendations, particularly concerning the proposed new financing model on Thursday 29 March.
In a position paper, the banking industry calls for the way in which the ESAs are financed to continue to be based principally on public financial contributions, as the rules of the financial institutions help to promote the public interest, it explains.
“While working on regulatory technical standards or implementing technical standards, the ESAs are in fact performing tasks that should be performed by the European Commission”, the organisation argues.
Readers may recall that the proposal tabled by the Commission in September of last year (see EUROPE 11864) laid down financing based on three sources: - annual contributions from the financial institutions indirectly supervised by the ESAs; - supervisory costs covered by directly supervised entities; - a balanced contribution from the EU, not exceeding 40% of the total revenue of each authority.
The EBF argues that since taxation is an exclusive competence of the member states, if the Commission introduced these annual contributions as a new source of income for the ESAs, it would effectively be imposing indirect taxation on economic operators, which would run counter to the founding treaties.
If, however, the co-legislators should decide to maintain these changes, the organisation considers that at the very least, it will be necessary to clarify the legislative text to cap the budget of each authority, but also to bring in a requirement to ensure that the costs at European level could not increase unless national costs fell as a result.
In the framework of the Single Supervisory Mechanism, the budget of the European Central Bank has risen from €296 million in 2015 to €425 million in 2017, yet the supervision costs paid at national level have not fallen, the EBF points out, by way of comparison.
The EBF's other detailed proposals are available at: https://bit.ly/2GRF4sz. (Original version in French by Marion Fontana)