ESMA have published the responses to the recent discussion paper on the upcoming European benchmark regulations. The responses can be found here. Europex highlighted their response with their own announcement here.

The responses from those in energy and commodities tend to highlight the important differences between the sector and the wider financial markets. As well as containing many “unsupervised entities”, there is widespread debate to be found in the responses as to the appropriateness of some of the tests.

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.