Rating Agency Violates Disclosure of Transparency Reports and More

CRA Transparency Reports 2021

“Transparency Reports” of credit rating agencies (CRAs) are published in accordance with Article 12 and Annex I, Section E.III of the EU Regulation on Credit Rating Agencies:

• (EC) No 1060/2009 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 16 September 2009 on credit rating agencies, as amended by Regulation
• (EU) No 513/2011 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11 May 2011 and as amended by Regulation
• (EU) No. 462/2013 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 21 May, 2013.

Rating agencies are therefore obliged to disclose their transparency reports in order to enable everyone to obtain certainty about the functioning of the rating agency. Unfortunately, the reports are not always easy to find. Therefore, the following lists can be found with all links to the current reports.

In one case, the report cannot be found by normal search engines, but it is stored in such a way that the supervisory authority, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) can be shown a link which, however, is normally not found by internet users. The link to the missing report can be found in the following lists.

Missing transparency report

With one of the registered credit rating agency, however, there is a clear violation of the CRA Regulation in the European Union:

There is a page that lists transparency reports, but all the links are broken and do not allow the alleged transparency reports to be downloaded. It makes no difference whether you search in German or in English. The mandatory reports are not available in neither German nor English. The violation relates not only to the most recent report, but also to previous years and other mandatory reports of the same credit rating agency. The reports, which are so important for investors and issuers, are permanently unavailable. The lack of reports is not due to temporary maintenance.

In this case it is again evident that the European supervisory authority is apparently working too slowly to punish such violations. The deficiency could be remedied by simply uploading the reports. It has been shown that it can sometimes take ESMA several years to punish a violation of the EU regulation on rating agencies. That is too late to allow market participants an up-to-date insight.

Incorrect file name

A leading American rating agency has its transparency reports ready with confusing labels. The “Transparency Report 2020” shows what is actually a transparency report for 2019. The right Transparency Report 2020 is also available, but in a different place and with a different link. This can lead to the erroneous use of this data in statistical evaluations. We have an example of this.

The following documentation proves the incorrect and misleading designations. Here is the wrong link first:

The following links led to the correct files – with the one exception mentioned above – on Friday, September 17th, 2021:

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