Expert resume of Professor emeritus 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.

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. From 2009 - 2021, he has been an assessor in the Belgium Competition Authority's Competition College.

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; 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 published by Comares; Elaborating a Climate-Friendly Legal Perspective for the ECB, 7 September 2022, revised and updated to be published as The ECB's mandate in the face of climate change and biodiversity loss in a forthcoming book: René Smits (ed.), Sustainable Finance and Climate Change - Law and Regulation, Edward Elgar Publishing, at SSRN; Financial sanctions: the development of an EU practice, 28 August 2023, to be published in a book by members of the Committee on International Monetary Law of the International Law Association (MOCOMILA), edited by Régis Bismuth, Professor of Law, Science Po Law School, Luc Thévenoz, Professor of Law, University of Geneva, and Chiara Zilioli, General Counsel, European Central Bank; Professor of Law, Goethe University Frankfurt. Co-editor of the Overview of case law on banking supervision by the European Central Bank and resolution by the Single Resolution Board: The Banking Union and Union Courts.