BRUSSELS: The European Parliament is aiming to soften plans to give European Union regulators the power to force London’s main clearing house to relocate if it wants to continue doing business in the single market after Brexit, an EU lawmaker said.

Euro clearing is one of the main battlegrounds between London and Brussels in divorce talks that will shape how Europe’s financial market is divided up when Britain leaves the European Union.

The European Commission proposed in June to give broad powers to itself, the European Central Bank and the European Securities and Markets Authority allowing them to force foreign clearing houses deemed “substantially systemically important” to move into the bloc, or face exclusion from the EU market.

“We don’t want to give those bodies this right to use total discretion in deciding what is cleared where,” Danuta Hubner, chair of the powerful constitutional affairs committee of the EU legislature, told Reuters.

Hubner, who is the leading EU lawmaker on clearing, said her report on the Commission’s plan, due to be finalised by the end of January, will include stricter conditions for regulators to determine whether clearing should be moved. She said she was confident parliament would back her amendments, although other prominent lawmakers have previously called for a sweeping relocation of euro business from London to the EU after Brexit.

Any new rules would also need approval from EU member states, which are competing to attract business from London, Europe’s biggest financial centre, after Brexit.

If confirmed by parliament, Hubner’s unexpected move is likely to be welcomed by the financial industry, which has warned that forced relocation could split markets, increase trading costs and diminish the status of the euro - besides threatening thousands of jobs in the City of London. At the moment, most derivatives denominated in euros are cleared in London through LCH, a subsidiary of the London Stock Exchange which reported record volumes last year across multiple clearing services.

Its interest rate derivatives clearing service, SwapClear, which dominates clearing of euro-denominated swaps or derivatives, processed trades with a notional value of more than $873 trillion in 2017.

LCH and rival Eurex in Germany are the only clearing houses likely to be deemed substantially systemically important by EU regulators, according to Hubner, meaning LCH would be the only one possibly affected by the draft EU law.

“We take additional criteria, and among them is the costs for the economy,” said Hubner, who is a former EU commissioner.

She said relocation decisions should also consider whether a service provided by a foreign clearing house could be replaced by companies within the EU. If not, the relocation could be put on hold, said Hubner.

Published in Dawn, January 13th, 2018