ECB Publishes Final Guidance On Leveraged Transactions— What This Means For Banks

After a period of public consultation, the European Central Bank (the "ECB") published its final Guidance on Leveraged Transactions (the "Guidance") on 16 May 2017¹. Twenty-four organisations (comprising credit institutions and market associations) commented directly on the ECB's draft guidance. Most comments focused on ensuring consistency between the ECB's Guidance and the 2013 Interagency Guidance on Leveraged Lending in the US (the "US Guidance") and ensuring market viability in Europe. We wrote about potential issues raised by the ECB's draft guidance in our last briefing²; here, we discuss the most relevant changes that made the final edit and, in addition, certain points that did not change despite representations from participants during consultation on the draft guidance. The ECB also published a feedback statement (the "Feedback Statement"), which presents an overall assessment of the comments received during the public consultation and should be referred to