ESMA has issued its annual European Common Enforcement Priorities (ECEP) Statement for 2023, which sets out the expectations of ESMA and NCAs with regards to specific areas of focus for the enforcement of the annual financial reports of issuers, including financial and sustainability reporting, European Single Electronic Format (ESEF) reporting and alternative performance measures (APMs). In particular, for this year’s ECEP, the areas for attention identified focus on cross-cutting topics, such as climate and environmental-related matters and macroeconomic environment.
Given the importance of climate and environmental-related matters for financial market participants (in particular issuers and investors), ESMA has published, together with the 2023 ECEP a fact-finding exercise addressing the implementation of the Taxonomy Regulation and a report on disclosures of climate matters in IFRS Financial statements. The three documents are accessible below:
ESMA believes that these documents will greatly assist issuers, supervisory bodies and auditors in the process of improving disclosures regarding climate and environmental-related matters, as well as investors in better understanding them.
The IT technical guidance (2013/1358) contains the following set of documents:
IT technical guidance in which is included the description of changes performed on the technical guidance and/or XSD documents in sheet “change history”,
XML samples for AIFM and AIF reports,
Excel version of Annex III – “Table of geographical areas”,
Excel version of Annex II – Tables 1-10,
Current version of XSD documents (Version 1.2)
Questions regarding technical support should be sent to info.it.aifmd@esma.europa.eu. Each AIFM should contact directly the national competent authorities to know how the filling of the XML reports will be handled at national level.
Rev 4 publication
The IT technical guidance revision 4 is currently applicable until November 2023 when revision 5 becomes applicable. Exact date will be published at a later stage.
The current IT technical guidance revision 4 contains modifications on the IT technical guidance to take into account the last published version of Questions and Answers (Q&A) on the application of the AIFMD (2014/868) as well as some clarifications and correction of inconsistencies with XSD documents.”
The IT technical guidance revision 6 will be applicable from November 2023 onwards. Exact date will be published at a later stage.
Update 16/10/2023: The changes will be applicable from 15 November 2023.
The new IT technical guidance revision 6 introduces new validation rules making more fields mandatory or with stricter rules to improve data quality. The new changes are specified in the tab ‘change history’ of the excel document. Reporting entities should use the version revision 6 to submit reports required under Articles 3(3)(d) and 24(1), (2) and (4) of AIFMD by November 2023. The reference period for the first reporting is Y1,H2,Q4 or X2 2023.
The IT technical guidance revision 6 replaces the IT technical guidance revision 5 published in January 2023.
