See here for an article on the Bloomberg web site which reports the German Finance Ministry’s objection to the manner in which the MiFID II delay has been set up.

There are several issues: Firstly, the transposition date, i.e. the date by which member states need to put the rules into local law, has not yet been moved from July 2016. It is proposed to move it to mid 2017, but this has not yet happened. The issue with the current date is that not all of the details have been finalised , particularly those contained in the Delegated Act and Regulatory Technical Standards (RTS). The suggestion from the Ministry is that rather than moving the deadline to a new absolute date, a “relative” deadline is established, which puts the deadline at x months after the details are available.

Similarly, the commodities and energy trading sector awaits both the Delegated Acts, and also the final RTS’s, especially RTS 20 and 21, governing the Ancillary Activity test and Position Limits. With a fixed deadline, the longer these details take to be finalised, the less time market participants will have to make the appropriate preparations ,especially if the exemption is lost, and a regulated entity needs to be created, which is a not a light undertaking.