Delegated regulation 2012/272 - Supplement to Regulation 1060/2009 with regard to fees charged by the European Securities and Markets Authority to credit rating agencies - Main contents

EN

Official Journal of the European Union

L 90/6

Article 62 of Regulation (EU) No 1095/2010 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 November 2010 establishing a European Supervisory Authority (European Securities and Markets Authority) (2) provides that the revenues of the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) should also consist of fees paid to ESMA in cases specified in Union legislation alongside contributions from national public authorities and a subsidy from the Union.

To ensure an efficient use of ESMA’s budget and, at the same time, alleviate the financial burden for Member States and the Union, it is necessary to ensure that credit rating agencies pay at least all the costs related to their supervision. Any deficit that may occur during 1 financial year should be recovered from credit rating agencies in the following year.

An annual supervisory fee should be charged to credit rating agencies exceeding a certain threshold of turnover in order to provide for budgetary certainty for both ESMA and the credit rating agencies concerned. Annual supervisory fees should not become a burden for new entrants to the credit rating market. Moreover, small credit rating agencies are expected to engender significantly less supervisory costs than larger ones. It would be therefore proportionate to fully exempt small credit rating agencies from paying the annual supervisory fee where the credit rating agency or the group of credit rating agencies to which it belong do not exceed a certain threshold of turnover.

In order to ensure a fair and clear allocation of fees which, at the same time, reflects the actual administrative burden per supervised entity, the supervisory fee should be calculated according to the credit rating agencies’ turnover, generated from rating activities and ancillary services, since the cost of supervision is higher for larger credit rating agencies than for smaller ones. Moreover, the provision of ancillary services requires additional supervisory effort as possible conflicts of interests resulting from the provision of ancillary services need monitoring. Credit rating agencies should not circumvent the fair allocation of fees according to this Regulation by reallocating revenue to other entities within their group in order to reduce their fee contributions. ESMA should monitor and report any critical developments in this respect.

A registration fee should be charged to credit rating agencies established in the Union to reflect ESMA’s costs for processing the application for registration. The complexity of an application and costs associated to assessing the application increase where a credit rating agency applies for issuing ratings for structured finance instruments or plans to endorse ratings from third country agencies or has branches. Therefore the registration fee should be calculated according to those factors. The processing costs also depend to a large extent on the size of the applicant credit rating agency. As the future turnover of a new credit rating agency would not be known at the moment of its application for registration, the number of employees should replace turnover as a common basis for calculation of all credit...