Expert resume of Professor Dr. René Smits

Professor emeritus of the Law of EMU, University of Amsterdam; Member of the Administrative Board of Review, European Central Bank; Consultant on banking regulation; P.R.I.M.E. Finance Expert

Professor emeritus Dr. René Smits is a consultant on the law of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), EU banking regulation, sustainable finance and competition law. He was a part-time professor of the law of the EMU at the University of Amsterdam where he still teaches in the Master Law & Finance. He is a Member of the Administrative Board of Review (ABoR), the independent review panel for the ECB’s supervisory decisions, and an assessor in the Belgian Competition Authority’s Competition College.

Professor emeritus Smits has been the General Counsel of the Netherlands Central Bank (DNB), where he worked for 24 years. In 2001, he became Head of the Legal Department of the Netherlands Competition Authority (NMa). He has been Chief Legal Counsel to the Board of NMa (2004-2013) and Compliance Officer (2009-2013). Until March 2014, he was Strategic Legal Counsel, Compliance Officer and Complaints Officer at the Authority for Consumers & Markets (ACM), successor to NMa.

Some recent academic publications: (together with John Taylor) Bank Holding Company Regulation in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa: A Comparative Inventory and a Call for Pan-African Regulation, Journal of Banking Regulation, Volume 18, 2017, 1-36; and at SSRN; (together with Concetta Brescia Morra and Andrea Magliari) The Administrative Board of Review of the European Central Bank: experience after two years, European Business Organization Law Review, 2017; in Dutch: De Administrative Board of Review van de Europese Centrale Bank: de eerste ervaringen, Tijdschrift voor Financieel recht 2018, No. 4; Competences and alignment in an emerging future – After L-Bank: how the Eurosystem and the Single Supervisory Mechanism may develop, ADEMU Working Paper Series No. WP 2017/077, October 2017; A central bank in times of crisis: the ECB’s developing role in the EU’s currency union in Research Handbook on Central Banking, edited by Peter Conti-Brown and Rosa María Lastra, Edward Elgar, 2018, pp. 184-207; The invisible core of values in the European integration project, From the Board (editorial), Legal Issues of Economic Integration 45, no. 3 (2018): 221-228; Towards a single standard of professional secrecy for supervisory authorities – A reform proposal, co-authored with Nikolai Badenhoop, published in: (2019) 44 E.L. Rev. 295-318, also at SSRN; A National Measure Annulled by the European Court of Justice, or: High-level Judicial Protection for Independent Central Bankers: ECJ 26 February 2019, Cases C-202/18, Ilmārs Rimšēvičs v Republic of Latvia, and C-238/18 European Central Bank v Republic of Latvia, ECLI:EU:C:2019:139, DOI; SSM and the SRB accountability at European level: room for improvements? Banking Union Scrutiny paper for the European Parliament’s Economic Governance Support Unit (EGOV), April 2020, available here; Op-Ed on EULawLive: The European Central Bank’s pandemic bazooka: mandate fulfilment in extraordinary times, 23 March 2020. This Op-Ed has been elaborated in a chapter of a book (pdf here) EU Law in Times of Pandemic – the EU’s Legal Response to COVID-19, edited by Dolores Utrilla and Anjum Shabbir to be published by Comares; Elaborating a Climate Change-Friendly Legal Perspective for the ECB, 29 August 2021, at SSRN.