Following on from the fun and games back in 2014 - I got the following email from my broker today: Account: Dear XXX LTD Subject: LEI Registration and MiFID II MiFID II will introduce additional rules on transaction reporting for all FCA regulated firms that execute trades on behalf of legal entity clients. From 3 January 2018 ADMISI will not be able to execute a trade in the European Union on behalf of a client which is eligible for a Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) unless that client has supplied ADMISI with an LEI. A legal entity includes a company, a charity and a trust but does not include an individual. Please reply to this email before Friday 7 July by doing one of the following:- 1. If you already have an LEI, please include it in your reply; 2. If you do not have an LEI, please obtain one (see below*) and include it in your reply; 3. If you do not propose to trade in the European Union, please say so in your reply. If you have already sent ADMISI your LEI, please confirm your current LEI by replying to this email so we can be sure that we have the correct one. *Further information about LEIs and how to obtain one is available on the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF) website https://www.gleif.org/en/about-lei/questions-and-answers or the FCA website https://www.fca.org.uk/markets/mifid-ii/legal-entity-identifier-lei-update Kind regards ADM Customer Services I will phone them up again - but it looks like traders who operate through limited companies like myself are going to need an LEI. I looked on the list at https://www.leiroc.org/lei/how.htm and the cheapest that I could see that appeared to accept foreign entities is Central Securities Clearing Corporation (Centralna klirinško depotna družba d.d.- KDD), Slovenia https://storitve.kdd.si/lei/en/index at EUR78+VAT application and EUR 41+ VAT renewal. This is about two thirds of the cost of the LSE (London Stock Exchange) and CICI (although I am not sure about CICI VAT). Anybody else done any research on this. Know anything about this?
ADMISI said that I need it to trade ICE Europe It's G20 sponsored so not just the EU. But it is darn silly and another bureaucratic cost. Why not just have say a 4 digit country code followed by the company registration no. I am can just picture the civil servants sitting in expensive meals at conferences in 5* Swiss hotels. And they have the cheek to say that this piece of nonsense is going to save the "industry" billions pa. but fail to give any indication of how. eg https://regtechfs.com/what-leis-ben...the-global-identifier-reap-long-term-savings/ ADMISI said that I need one - I tried phoning KDD LEI but the phone rang dead twice after some Slovenian probably saying that your call is being recorded for training and monitoring purposes and some canned music. I have sent them an email to see if they can allocate LEIs to foreign companies. Guess that this I just have to put it down to another cost of trading.
Just to say I got my LEI from KDD. They seemed a bit disorganised, ie I had trouble with their website login, etc, but friendly and they were significantly cheaper than the rest. Took about 3-4 days.