The European Parliament (Parliament) has voted in favour of a one year postponement of MiFIR by 504 to 157, with 9 abstentions. The Parliament has also backed a similar postponement to MiFID II by 502 to 158, with 6 abstentions.

The Parliament press release states that during the debate which proceeded the votes, many MEPs from across the political spectrum were sharply critical of the European Commission and the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) for prompting the deferral in the new rules.

The rapporteur for the legislation, Markus Ferber, stated: “It is clearly ESMA and especially the Commission who are to blame for this delay as they have been wasting a lot of time when preparing the MiFID II implementing legislation. Due to this dawdling, we are almost a year behind schedule now and key elements such as reigning in high frequency trading and putting food speculation to an end are still not in force.”

The original deadline to transpose MiFID II (3 July 2016) has also been extended by a year. The reform package also includes three targeted amendments to legislation. The first introduces a dedicated regime for the treatment of package transactions with regards to pre-trade transparency obligations. Second, there is a clarification for the own account exemption for corporate end-users and securities financing transactions were excluded from the MiFID II transparency obligations. Third, a technical cross-referencing issue between the Prospectus Directive and MiFID II was addressed.

View Parliament gives firms a further year to implement financial legislation, 7 June 2016