The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), the EU’s financial markets regulator and supervisor, has published a statement on the treatment of settlement fails with respect to the Central Securities Depositories Regulation (CSDR) penalty mechanism, following the major incident that affected TARGET Services (T2S and T2) last month.
Concretely, ESMA clarifies in this statement that National Competent Authorities (NCAs) do not expect CSDs to apply cash penalties in relation to settlement fails for the days of 27 and 28 of February 2025.
A major incident caused by a failure of the infrastructure component adversely affected T2S and T2 on 27 of February 2025 causing that settlement instructions, payment, ancillary system instructions or liquidity transfers between TARGET Services could not be processed for several hours.
As specified in an existing CSDR Q&A, cash penalties should not be applied in situations where settlement cannot be performed for reasons that are independent from the involved participants.
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