On 11 July 2018, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) published an introductory statement for the European Parliament’s Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee (ECON) scrutiny session on Level 2 measures under the EU Benchmarks Regulation (BMR).

Key points from the statement include:

• further to eleven draft technical standards delivered to the European Commission on 30 March 2017, ESMA has provided further technical standards covering cooperation arrangements with third countries;
• the delayed endorsement of the regulatory technical standards (RTS) has created uncertainty and risks the proper implementation of the BMR. ESMA has requested the Commission to give as soon as possible clarity on the endorsement of the RTS; and
• in the context of Level 3 measures, ESMA published a consultation paper on the guidelines applicable only to administrators of non-significant benchmarks on 29 September 2017. These guidelines define how administrators of non-significant benchmarks should apply the obligations related to: oversight function, input data, transparency of methodology, governance and control requirements for supervised contributors. The content of the guidelines is interlinked with the content of the technical standards covering the same four topics. For this reason, ESMA is waiting for the publication of the relevant technical standards in the EU Official Journal before publishing the final version of the guidelines.