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Sven Giegold, German MEP and coordinator of The Greens/European Free Alliance Party in the ECON committee, says Member States represented in the Council are seeking to unravel EIOPA's recommendations and graft their own policy proposals onto the Omnibus II package.
"We commissioned EIOPA to produce a well-balanced assessment. This is now being opened up again by the Member States. Everybody wants more for their respective insurance firms and some of these demands are quite extreme. By this, I think, they are risking the success of Solvency II", says Giegold.
Members of the Council are vying for amendments to EIOPA's proposals on all elements of the package of measures on LTGs, such as the volatility adjustment, the matching adjustment, the transitional measures and the extrapolation methodology for the risk-free terms structure. The trilogue discussions on Omnibus II resumed on 10 September, after they stalled last year over how products with long-term guarantees would be treated by Solvency II. An agreement in trilogue on Omnibus II is needed before the Directive can be approved.
A spokesperson for the Presidency of the Council refused to comment on the current negotiations, beyond saying the Council had presented its own proposals for the treatment of long-term guarantees, and also made representations on behalf of Member States.
A spokesperson for the European Commission, which is also represented at the trilogue, insists the discussions were confined to the parameters of EIOPA's report and that no party was seeking to introduce new measures at this stage. But EIOPA's report would also not be treated as gospel, the spokesperson added. On certain aspects, such as the calibration of the volatility adjustment, the report left leeway for negotiation.