The purpose of this document is to promote common supervisory approaches and practices in the application of MAR and its implementing measures. It does this by providing responses to questions posed by the general public and competent authorities in relation to the practical application of the MAR framework

The content of this document is aimed at competent authorities to ensure that in their supervisory activities and their actions are converging along the lines of the responses adopted by ESMA and at helping issuers, investors and other market participants by providing clarity on the content of the market abuse rules, rather than creating an extra layer of requirements.

According to Article 7(2) of the Short Selling Regulation, ESMA has to publish a list of the thresholds applicable to the sovereign issuers for the purpose of the notification to competent authorities of significant net short position in sovereign debt.

The way these notification thresholds are defined is further specified in the Commission Delegated Regulation No 918/2012 (the “DR”). The DR specifies that initial threshold categories shall be:
1.0.1% applicable where the total amount of outstanding issued sovereign debt is between 0 and 500 billion euros;
2.0.5% applicable where the total amount of outstanding issued sovereign debt is above 500 billion euros or where there is a liquid futures market for the particular sovereign debt.

The additional incremental levels shall be set at 50% of the initial thresholds. The reporting thresholds shall be monetary amounts fixed by applying the percentage thresholds to the outstanding sovereign debt of the sovereign issuer. They will be revised and updated quarterly to reflect changes in the total amount of outstanding sovereign debt of each sovereign issuer.

In addition, the DR states that the amount of outstanding debt should be calculated using a duration adjusted approach. ESMA has published a Q&A document on how to proceed for the duration adjustment.

The table of thresholds contains the name of the sovereign issuer, the amount of outstanding debt duration adjusted, the initial threshold amount and the relevant percentage, the incremental threshold amount and the relevant percentage.

Please note that the figures of the amount of outstanding debt are duration adjusted (not nominal amounts) and are approximations provided by competent authorities.