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Opening the meeting, Eddy Wymeersch gave a short overview of CESR’s evolving role during the last five years.
The last years, he said, were devoted to the questions of regulation and Level II issues. This phase is now largely behind us, he stated.
The future work will be highly dominated by the review of the Lamfalussy process and supervisory mechanisms. However, there are also matters of concern, mainly because of CESR’s legal status and the fact that CESR does not have a European mandate.
Starting the discussion, Mrs Kauppi (EPP, FIN), was concerned that currently only 3 Member States had implemented MiFID and asked CESR what it would do about this.
Mrs Beres (PES, F) was interested in the latest consultation on inducements and asked what the main problems were.
Mr Purvis (EPP, UK) referred to a FT article which stated that the CESR process itself makes it impossible to implement the Directive properly.
Responding to the questions, Mr Wymeersch underlined that he thinks that almost all Member States will have implemented the Directive in time. Germany, France and Belgium, for example, have already adopted the directive or are in the final stage of implementation.
On the matter of inducements, he recalled the two consultations and noted that market participants agreed with the revised document.
Coming back to the FT article Mr Wymeersch said that the complains about the MiFID implementation might be a UK problem as the FSA were probably introducing things “that go beyond the original”. This could be a form of gold-plating, he said.
Mrs van den Burg (PES, NL) asked about the differences of regulation particularly in the insurance and the securities sector, sometimes on the same kind of products, and the mediation process.
Mr Wymeersch outlined that on ‘substitute products’ there existed a diversity of opinions among regulators and their perception of how important these issues are.
With regard to the markets, similar products are sometimes subject to different rules, rules of disclosure, different levels of investor protection, etc. However, these are clearly political questions, he said and underlined that follow up work was needed.
On the subject of mediation he noted that it is imperfect in so far as it is voluntary and the outcome is not binding. One of the key questions is how to enforce the decisions taken by CESR. Therefore, it has to be distinguished between the relationship among supervisors themselves on the one hand, and the effect on third parties, or market participants, on the other. These questions will be part of the Lamfalussy review.
Responding to a question on the storage mechanism, Mr Wymeersch outlined that the CESR working party is proposing a “model C”, which means that storage is based at national level, but linked internationally. However, CESR is still awaiting the Commission opinion.
On the question by Mr Goebbels (PES, LUX) on the increasing role of CESR as a model for other countries outside the EU, Mr Wymeersch stated that other countries including India and China have already announced their interest. Obviously, CESR has done a good job, he said.
However, there is still a lot of work to do inside the European Union to integrate the markets, particularly with regard to the retail sector and its Consumer Credit and Mortgage Credit directives. The current use of directives may allow and lead to gold-plating, he complained.
Responding to the question posed by Mrs Starkeviciute (LIBE, LIT) on the increasing use of the European Company Statute in the new member states, Mr Wymeersch said that its use is currently rather rare in the EU. However, some companies use this to transform subsidiaries into branches. He believes that this tool will be used increasingly in future.
Finally, Mr Wymeersch underlined that there are clear limits of capacity of CESR, both with regard to personnel and financing, which will become a subject in the near future.