1. This support can come in a variety of forms. Since 2008 onwards, the ECB has progressively expanded its liquidity provision for Euro Area banks through short and longer-term refinancing operations (MROs and LTROs) and other measures: http://www.ecb.int/mopo/implement/omo/html/index.en.html (accessed on 13 September 2013). The ECB has also sought to address distortions in government bond markets through its programme of Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT, formally launched mid-September 2012) in secondary markets for sovereign bonds. The OMT programme steers around the prohibition on central bank financing of governments by restricting interventions to the secondary market. As of mid-September 2013, OMT existed on paper only and had not been actively deployed. A constitutional challenge before the German Constitutional Court is pending.
2. Euro Area Summit Statement, 29 June 2012. The Treaty Establishing the ESM, which entered into force in September 2012 emphasises strict conditionality.
3. Consolidated Version of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union [2008] OJ C115/47, Art 127(6); Protocol (No 4) on the Statute of the European System of Central Banks and of the ECB [2010] OJ C83/230 (ECB Statute), Art 25(2).
4. The Council's final compromise text was published as Council Document 9044/13, on 1 July 2013. In this paper, unless clearly otherwise indicated, references to the ECB Regulation relate to the Council's final compromise text. The numbering of articles, as well as some of their content, may change in the final version.
5. One significant political obstacle is that for the Euro Area banking industry to be supervised by a body located in London would not work for members of the EU17 group but keeping it in London has become a “red line” for the UK in its negotiating position. A major legal hurdle to the direct empowerment of the EBA as a full-blown supervisor is that theMeronidoctrine in EU law, Case 9/56Meroni v High Authority[1958] ECR 133, restricts delegation of wide discretionary powers to agencies.