ESMA have issued this discussion paper regarding the upcoming benchmark regulation, which will amongst other things affect commodity benchmarks, primarily administrators of such benchmarks but in some cases also contributors. The rules propose that contributors that are “unsupervised” entities, i.e. Non Financial Counterparties, will be subject to a lower level of regulation. However, MiFID II may well create more supervised entities in energy and commodity trading due to the potential loss of exemption under the ancillary activity tests, when the details of those are finalised.

There will also be an open hearing on the topic on the 29th February along with certain aspects of MAR.