On 27 March 2020, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) announced that it had decided to keep the date of application of the transparency calculations for equity instruments of 1 April 2020 unchanged.

ESMA has recently been asked by some stakeholders to postpone the date of application – required by MiFID II / MiFIR to apply from 1 April, on the basis of the extraordinary market circumstances created by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Whilst acknowledging the severity of the situation ESMA considers that delaying the application of the new transparency results would in itself entail some risks and might even create additional operational burdens to all the market participants that have already planned for them.

The results of the MiFID II / MiFIR transparency calculations for equity instruments were published on 28 February 2020. As announced on that date, ESMA will also publish ahead of 1 April the results for several instruments that were not published then due to data quality limitations.