The European Parliament has agreed in a plenary session to the proposed changes  to EMIR as part of the REFIT process, passed by the ECON committee a few weeks ago (see here). The agreed document will be used to represent the stance of the Parliament in the “Trialogue” process in the coming weeks. The press release from the Parliament can be found here.

The changes cover several areas of interest to non financial counterparties in the energy and commodities sector including:

• Transactions between internal entities, where either entity is a Non Financial Counterparty (NFC) are no longer reportable.
• Transactions between Financial Counterparties (FC) and Non Financial Counterparties under the clearing threshold (NFC-) should be reported by the FC on behalf of the NFC-, no matter where the NFC- is located.
• The idea of an FC threshold is introduced. FCs under the threshold (FC-) would no longer be subject all of the clearing regulations.

The Trialogue will resolve some of the differences in detail that the three parties are proposing.

EMIR supervisory measures and penalties
ESMA has published this report, which looks at the implementation of supervisory measures and penalties related to EMIR by the different National Competent Authorities (NCAs) over the previous period. The report focuses on Articles 4( Clearing Obligation), 9 (Reporting), 10 (Non financial counterparty issues such as the clearing threshold) and 11 (Risk mitigation). The table on page 28 shows the number of investigations undertaken by each NCA in each area. Reporting (Article 9) shows a relatively high number of investigations, whereas non financial counterparty rules (Article 10) show a relatively low number other than in Belgium and Poland.

Last year, the UK’s FCA issued a £34.5M fine for failure ot report under EMIR (see here).