CSSF Press Release On Mandatory Use Of Legal Entity Identifier Under MiFID II/MiFiR And EMIR

The CSSF issued on 12 October 2017 a press release whereby it reminds that under the new EMIR reporting requirements, the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) will be mandatory as of 1 November 2017 to identify the counterparty in a derivative transaction (i.e. reporting counterparty ID) and that, in order to accept the EMIR reports, trade repositories will check the LEI of the reporting counterparty with the GLEIF database.

The use of an LEI is already required under a number of EU regulations and directives such as:

• European Markets Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR) – counterparties to derivatives contracts as well as beneficiaries, brokers, CCPs and clearing members;
• Market Abuse Regulation (MAR) – issuers of financial instruments; entities involved or reporting in suspicious transactions;