Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-09-04-Speech-2-088"
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"en.20010904.6.2-088"2
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".
I would like to express my enormous reservations about the new draft Statute for a European Company which, in my view, is complicated, useless and is likely, in the long run, to bring about undesirable results.
The call for a unified statutory framework for European limited companies, which disregards diversity in national law, is an old federalist demand that is nearly as old as the Community itself, given that the first discussions on this subject were launched in 1959, and the first concrete proposal from the Commission dates back to 1970. This idea, however, comes up against national laws that are deeply rooted in the mentality of each nation, such as social legislation, for example, regarding employee involvement, in particular – or tax legislation. We have been discussing this issue for 30 years without making any progress, and everyone was resigned to being unable to move it forward, which may mean, in other words, that a solution is not as urgent as we believe and that we could manage to live without it.
Then suddenly, at the Nice European Council last December, the French Presidency, obviously desperately wanting to show that it had achieved some results, managed to bring about an agreement. In truth, however, the statute achieved in this way juxtaposes the different types of national social legislation, which the partners may choose between, and yet the statute has absolutely no fiscal provisions.
The new proposal therefore seems both complex and inadequate. No one has managed to assess it properly either. Parliament’s Committee on Employment and Social Affairs states that “some organisations (which ones?) maintain that the statute for an SE would save European businesses EUR 30 000 million a year” (according to whose calculations?). In fact, in a letter dated 24 August 2001 to Members of Parliament, European businessmen wrote to reiterate their position, in other words, that a Statute for a European Company will offer no significant economic benefits, unless it is backed up by an agreement on an appropriate fiscal regime. Yet, this agreement does not currently exist. Up to now, the Member States have wanted to retain their fiscal powers.
Given these circumstances, it seems that the European Company Statute, for which there is not much appetite at the present time, is being pursued mainly because of the chain of events it could give rise to, leading to the destabilisation of national laws by a supranational statute that the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs would even like to see applied to small businesses. If this draft were pushed through, it would lead to the confusion and dispossession of states without providing any real benefit for Europe. It is true that in its current form it is not likely to be used, which would be the best thing for it. The adepts of unification however will not give up on it so quickly."@en1
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