ESMA has urgently asked the European Commission to put off the start date for the reporting of exchange-traded derivatives (ETDs) to trade repositories by one year to January 2015, saying current technical standards did not distinguish between OTC derivatives and ETDs. 

The request comes less than five months from when reporting of trades is meant to begin. OTC derivatives reporting is still scheduled to start on 1 January 2014. This was expected because the ESMA has a long list of regulation to look at, including the European market infrastructure regulation (EMIR) and preparing for final MiFID II rules, and don’t have enough staff to deal with them all.

Other mags and web-sites have commented:

• EuroTreasurer: ‘New delays shows EMIR is headed for a “crash” - “The latest The latest postponement lays bare the flimsy planning that went into the large-scale project. “There will be a train crash at the end of the year,” predicts John Grout, Policy and Technical Director at the UK’s treasurers’ association ACT, referring to the extremely low likelihood that enough companies will be in compliance with EMIR by 2014 to ensure successful implementation.“ EuroTreasurer also remarked on how the rules will be enforced by the local regulators and most of them have indicated that they will lenient in their implementation. And that there has been few good briefings on EMIR except for the ACT‘s EMIR guide.
• International Treasurer web-site is even wondering whether the European regulatoros might yet to decide to use US swap rules instead of EMIR. They believe that regulators have not yet finally made their minds up whether it would be better to substitute another jurisdiction’s swap rules for their own because it would mean that swap users would only have to comply with one rule set or two for transactions booked in foreign jurisdictions. The first of such rulings (for the US) is slated to arrive September 1.
• AFPonline web-site comments “In U.S. rules, for example, corporates face dreaded ambiguity stemming from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's (CFTC) sometimes hazy guidance, such as no-action rulings impacting cross-border swap activity”. There is particular concern about the CFTC no-action issued earlier this year which impact “companies' central treasury centers, which aggregate swap trades between affiliates that frequently are in different regulatory jurisdictions. However, the rulings' limited commitments and circumstances for which regulators will not pursue enforcement actions against the company have raised concerns among corporate boards, potentially hindering a company's borrowing”

Swaps regulation really is a mess on both sides of the Atlantic. And, not only this, new rulings are to still to come, AFP: “Regulators may not allow a home country's rules to substitute for the foreign jurisdiction's, requiring swap users to apply two sets of rules to each transaction. Worse, regulators may allow most-but not all-of a foreign jurisdiction's rules to be substituted, creating a web of compliance obligations for end users.“

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The only sensible course of action for individual corporate treasurers is to encourage their local treasury organisations to keep battling to simplify and clarify the regulations and not spend huge sums on consultancy when nothing is clear or finalised, unlike Dodd-Frank.