MEPs, meeting in Strasbourg in Parliament's plenary session, approved on Thursday 18 April the agreements reached at the end of February (see EUROPE 12203/4) between representatives of the European Parliament and the EU Council on the new pan-European framework for covered bonds, consisting of a directive that received 425 votes and a regulation that received 426 votes.
The new framework establishes the structural characteristics of the instrument, the rules allowing the use of the European guaranteed bond label and the conditions for granting preferential prudential treatment to guaranteed bonds under the CRR Regulation on capital requirements (see EUROPE 11979/1).
The rapporteur, Bernd Lucke (ECR, Germany), particularly welcomed the fact that the European Parliament's proposal to distinguish between “European premium covered bonds”, which should meet higher criteria on the quality of assets specified in Article 129 of the CRR prudential regulation, and other covered bonds (‘European covered bonds’), which meet only the criteria set out in the directive (see EUROPE 12141/24), was included in the final text.
In plenary session, MEPs also took note of the European Commission's statement, annexed to the directive, committing itself to amending the delegated regulation on liquidity requirements for credit institutions in order to avoid overlap with the new rules on covered bonds.
See the agreed text of the Regulation: https://bit.ly/2vjFKjb and the Directive: https://bit.ly/2IqP8Kb (Original version in French by Marion Fontana)