Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-07-04-Speech-3-116"
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"en.20010704.3.3-116"2
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".
The joint text for a European Parliament and Council directive on company law concerning takeover bids is rejected by my group. The compromise approved by the Conciliation Committee is unacceptable to us.
Moreover, in conjunction with the directive on company law concerning takeover bids, a directive on the requirement for neutrality is urgently required. This has been available in draft form since 1972 and has still not been adopted. It is time for Mr Bolkestein and the Council to do their homework. To give them the chance to do so, we have rejected the text before us.
As the proverb says, ‘Time brings everything to those who wait’, and after 12 years of discussion, we could have expected that a perfect directive would be produced. Yet the opposite is the case.
What are the problems?
1. There are protected companies in the Member States, either through voting restrictions, ‘golden shares’, or multiple voting rights, etc. The directive entrenches a situation in which protected companies can take over unprotected ones, yet unprotected companies cannot take over protected ones. This means that there is no equal treatment (‘level playing field’).
2. The directive fails to include principles governing the definition of the ‘equitable price’ to be offered in the case of a mandatory bid; it also contains no provisions on ‘squeeze-out’ (the right of the majority shareholder in a company to acquire the shares of minority shareholders).
3. European companies would be exposed to pressure from the major financial corporations in Europe, with wealth creation henceforth giving way to the sole aim of maximising profits. This in turn increases the danger that this type of takeover will result in large-scale job shedding.
4. The co-determination rights of workforce representatives are not sufficiently articulated. The requirement that appropriate information should be given to the representatives of the company’s employees offers no guarantee that they will be able to exert any influence on the takeover process.
The Commission itself is quite aware of these problems as well, for it proposes that a group of company law experts be requested to examine the further harmonisation of company law and define a clear position on Article 9 of this directive by March 2002.
What kind of logic is that? I think it would have been more sensible to convene a group of experts to present its conclusions and then produce a directive, rather than first producing a directive and then asking a group of experts to discuss the unresolved problems."@en1
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