Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2015/2205 (the “Regulation”) supplementing the European Markets Infrastructure Regulation (“EMIR”) was published on 1 December in the Official Journal of the European Union.
The Regulation covers the clearing of EUR, GBP, JPY and USD denominated basis and fixed-to-floating interest rate swaps; as well as EUR, GBP and USD denominated forward rate agreements and overnight index swaps.
The Regulation will enter into force 20 days from publication (21 December 2015), with the clearing obligation itself coming into effect, as follows:
21 June 2016: “Category 1” entities - clearing members of at least one of the classes of OTC derivatives set out in the Regulation, of at least one of the Central Clearing Counterparties authorised or recognised before that date to clear at least one of those classes of OTC derivatives.
21 December 2016: “Category 2” entities - counterparties not belonging to Category 1 which belong to a group whose aggregate month-end average of outstanding gross notional amount of non-centrally cleared derivatives for January, February and March 2016 is above EUR 8 billion and which are any of the following:
(i) financial counterparties1; or
(ii) alternative investment funds as defined in the Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive that are non-financial counterparties.
21 June 2017: “Category 3” entities - counterparties not belonging to Category 1 or Category 2 which are any of the following:
(i) financial counterparties; or
(ii) alternative investment funds as defined in the Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive that are non-financial counterparties.
21 December 2018: “Category 4” entities - non-financial counterparties2 that do not belong to Category 1, Category 2 or Category 3.
Footnotes