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The three European Supervisory Authorities (EBA, EIOPA and ESMA – ESAs) have delivered to the European Commission (EC) their Final Report with draft Regulatory Technical Standards (RTS) regarding disclosures under the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) as amended by the Regulation on the establishment of a framework to facilitate sustainable investment (Taxonomy Regulation). The disclosures relate to financial products that make sustainable investments contributing to environmental objectives.
The draft RTS aim to:
Main proposals
The Report contains the following proposals:
Treatment of Sovereign Bonds
Regarding the specific issue of the treatment of sovereign bonds in the representation of the taxonomy-alignment of investments, the ESAs decided to require the disclosure of the taxonomy-alignment of investments in two ways: one including sovereign exposures and one excluding sovereign exposures from the calculation.
To protect investors from the risk of greenwashing, the draft RTS contain a graph which includes all the investments of the financial product in the calculation. As there is no appropriate methodology to assess the taxonomy-alignment of sovereign bonds, the ESAs added a second graph showing the taxonomy-alignment of the financial product where all sovereign exposures are excluded from the calculation.
Next steps
The EC will scrutinise the draft RTS and decide whether to endorse them within 3 months of their publication. The Commission has informed the European Parliament and Council that it intends to incorporate all the SFDR RTS, meaning both the original ones submitted to the Commission in February 2021 as well as the ones covered in this Final report, in one instrument.