(4)

without prejudice to Article 2 of this Regulation, in Part 1 of Annex I, Section 2 is replaced by the following: ‘Section 2: Specifications for the MMFs’ identification criteria For the purpose of Article 1a of this Regulation: (a) the money market instrument shall be considered to be of a high credit quality, if it has been awarded one of the two highest available short-term credit ratings by each recognised credit rating agency that has rated the instrument or, if the instrument is not rated, it is of an equivalent quality as determined by the management company’s internal rating process. Where a recognised credit rating agency divides its highest short-term rating into two categories, these two ratings shall be considered as a single category and therefore the highest rating available; (b) the money market fund may, as an exception to the requirement in paragraph (a), hold sovereign issuance of at least investment grade quality, whereby ‘sovereign issuance’ means money market instruments issued or guaranteed by a central, regional or local authority or central bank of a Member State, the ECB, the European Union or the European Investment Bank; (c) when calculating WAL for securities, including structured financial instruments, the maturity calculation is based on the residual maturity until the legal redemption of the instruments. However, when a financial instrument embeds a put option, the exercise date of the put option may be used instead of the legal residual maturity only if the following conditions are fulfilled at all times: — the put option may be freely exercised by the management company at its exercise date, — the strike price of the put option remains close to the expected value of the instrument at the next exercise date, — the investment strategy of the MMF implies that there is a high probability that the option will be exercised at the next exercise date; (d) when calculating both WAL and WAM, the impact of financial derivative instruments, deposits and efficient portfolio management techniques shall be taken into account; (e) ‘weighted average maturity’ (WAM) shall mean a measure of the average length of time to maturity of all of the underlying securities in the fund weighted to reflect the relative holdings in each instrument, assuming that the maturity of a floating rate instrument is the time remaining until the next interest rate reset to the money market rate, rather than the time remaining before the principal value of the security must be repaid. In practice, WAM is used to measure the sensitivity of a MMF to changing money market interest rates; (f) ‘weighted average life’ (WAL) shall mean the weighted average of the remaining maturity of each security held in a fund, meaning the time until the principal is repaid in full, disregarding interest and not discounting. Contrary to the calculation of the WAM, the calculation of the WAL for floating rate securities and structured financial instruments does not permit the use of interest rate reset dates and instead only uses a security’s stated final maturity. WAL is used to measure the credit risk, as the longer the reimbursement of principal is postponed, the higher the credit risk. WAL is also used to limit the liquidity risk; (g) ‘money market instruments’ means instruments normally traded on the money market which are liquid and have a value which can be accurately determined at any time; (h) ‘management company’ means a company, the regular business of which is the management of the portfolio of an MMF.’.