As discussed in our previous blog , ESMA has written to the European Commission ahead of the EU executive’s review of the AIFMD regulation. Although ESMA has recommended a raft of potential changes, one area that appears to be garnering particular attention, is the issue of delegation and substance.
When the European Commission announced back in March 2018, a proposal to amend the Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive (AIFMD), in order to provide for a uniform regime for “pre-marketing” of alternative investment funds (AIFs) across Europe, there were many commentators that declared that “AIFMD II had finally arrived”.
Last week, ESMA published a letter to the Commission setting out 19 key areas where it believes AIFMD could be improved. Specifically, ESMA’s letter includes: harmonising the AIFMD and UCITS regimes; delegation and substance; liquidity management tools; leverage; and the harmonisation of supervision of cross-border entities.
On 2nd September 2019, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) published its final guidance regarding liquidity stress tests of investment fund…
This month’s regulatory round-up pulls together some interesting regulatory developments we have tracked throughout June. The past month brought a number of important developments, particularly on the EU Money Market Fund Regulation, with ESMA publishing updated reporting instructions, and translations to the MMF guidelines.
This month marked one year since the collapse of Neil Woodford’s LF Woodford Equity Income fund. The Woodford fund was suspended in June, after it became overwhelmed by redemption requests from investors. One year on and investors are still awaiting their final pay-out. One year on and questions concerning the liquidity mismatches in open-ended funds still remain.
On 31 March 2020, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) announced that it was delaying the first reports by money market funds managers under the Money Market Funds Regulation (MMF Regulation) until September 2020. The original date for submissions was April 2020. The delay was due to an update to the XML schema.
The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) has published a supervisory briefing on the supervision by National Competent Authorities (NCAs) of costs applicable to Undertakings for the Collective Investment in Transferable Securities (UCITS) and Alternative Investment Funds (AIFs).
Fund liquidity problems witnessed in 2019 with Woodford and H2O Asset Management brought liquidity back into the spotlight. Since then, the focus hasn’t really faded on the issue of liquidity, and if anything, has intensified with the COVID-19 pandemic causing market volatility resulting in several more fund suspensions.
Although 2020 has already seen a number of initiatives intended to address liquidity risk, there are still more to come, with September due to be a particular busy month for risk management professionals.
On 30th October 2018, following the opinion issued by the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) on asset segregation and application of depositary delegation rules to CSDs, the European Commission published the following delegated regulations…
