On February 9, 2012, following a series of trialogue discussions between the European Commission (EC), the European Parliament (EP) and the Council of Ministers (CM), the final text for the European Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR) was agreed.  The agreed text will now be voted on by the EP and the CM, although these votes are unlikely to lead to any changes of the text.  The final text of EMIR has not yet been published, but this is due to be circulated in the coming days. 

The agreement follows several weeks of trialogue discussions and non-agreement on several points in the regulation, particularly on issues concerning central counterparties, frontloading of contracts and intragroup transactions. Had an agreement not been reached by mid-February, it was likely that the text would have been subject to a second reading, leading to further delays in the publication of the final text.

The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), along with the European Banking Authority (EBA), must now start drafting the technical standards which will be included in the text of EMIR.  The original deadline for the publication of these standards had been June 30, 2012, however, as a result of the delays in agreeing the final text, this deadline has been pushed back to September 30, 2012.  

By pushing back the deadline, ESMA and the EBA will be given sufficient time to seek the views of market participants on the levels of technical standards that should be adopted.  A public consultation on these standards is due to be launched around the end of February or beginning of March 2012, to which all market participants are strongly encouraged to contribute.  The technical standards concern matters including,inter alia, the clearing and reporting thresholds to be imposed on non-financial counterparties and the publication, by trade repositories, of aggregate positions by class of derivatives.   

With the deadline of the publication of technical standards being pushed back to the end of September, the 27 Member States of the European Union and market participants will then have less than three months to ensure that they have in place all the adequate systems to ensure full compliance with the regulation.  EMIR is due to come into force at the end of 2012, thus meeting the deadline set by the Group of 20 Summit in Pittsburgh in 2009. There has not yet been any formal indication that this implementation date will be pushed back, despite the delays in agreeing the final text.