ESMA publishes second Annual Report on waivers and deferrals for non-equity instruments

The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), the EU’s securities markets regulator, has today published its second Annual Report on waivers and deferrals for non-equity instruments under MiFIR.

This report includes an analysis of the waivers for non-equity instruments for which ESMA issued an opinion to the NCAs in the period between 1 January and 31 December 2019. It also includes an overview of the deferral regime for non-equity instruments applied across the different Member States.

The main findings are:

80% of the requests concerned the illiquid waiver (27%), the LIS waiver (24%), the OMF waiver (18%) and the SSTI waiver (11%);

the non-equity waivers assessed related to a variety of non-equity instruments, but mainly bonds (19%), IR derivatives and equity derivatives (13% each);

for post-trade transparency, deferrals for LIS transactions are commonly used across trading venues for the different types of non-equity instruments; and

for pre-trade transparency waivers, the Netherlands submitted the largest number of waiver notifications in 2019 reflecting the establishment of subsidiaries of trading venues operating in the UK in the context of Brexit.

While the first report was published in October 2019 and comprised both equity and non-equity, due to the Covid-19 outbreak and Brexit developments, ESMA has delayed the publication of the 2019 report and divided it into two: the one released today and the final report related to the application of waivers and deferrals for equity and equity-like instruments released at the beginning of February 2021.

ESMA, under MiFIR, is required to monitor the application of pre-trade transparency waivers and deferred trade-publication. As part of this mandate it submits an annual report to the European Commission on how equity and non-equity waivers and deferrals regimes are applied in practice.

Next steps

ESMA will publish the next annual reports in the second half of 2021 covering the analysis of the application of the waivers and deferral regimes in 2020.

Further information:

Dan Nacu-Manole

Communications Officer

✆   +33 (0)1 58 36