EU industry participants jointly ask the authority to postpone deadlines, ease its requirements on traceability and time stamping when they work from home, and to collect all its covid-19 decisions on a web page. ESMA now gives consultations another four weeks response time.

It is the EU authority’s own Securities and Markets Stakeholder Group that has taken the initiative to send four pages of advice to the European Securities and Markets Authority, ESMA. 

Seek delay to implementations

The senders propose postponements to deadlines for consultations and implementations, as well as certain reporting obligations. They also express their wish for coordination of the diverging national practices when it comes to limiting short selling, as well as “reliefs on full traceability and time stamping when Work From Home is activated”.

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“To ensure easy access and full transparency, ESMA should create one dedicated web-page with all measures and decisions ESMA is taking relating to the current crisis,” the group adds. 

Against the background of the covid 19-induced stock market collapse over the last months, with large indices down some 30 percent, ESMA last week issued positive opinions over short selling bans in Italy and France – two of the earliest European countries to face full epidemic spread of the virus. 

The call for more time to answer consultations has already been met by ESMA. In a message Friday, ESMA said consultations closing on or after 16 March will have their deadlines pushed four weeks forward.