Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-11-15-Speech-4-103"
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"en.20011115.5.4-103"2
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".
I have voted in favour of Mrs Peijs’s report and wish to emphasise the quality of the work that our rapporteur produced.
I am very pleased that our House is finally making a statement on an issue as important as this.
The patience of European consumers has clearly reached its limit. It has to be said that the banks have gone too far by making one promise after another that they fail to keep, content in their certainty that Brussels would not dare restrict their freedom to impose charges. The Commission has now been negotiating with them for eleven years… in vain. The banks have always refused to make the necessary investment to keep the cost of cross-border transfers down. At the same time, the current system allows them to build up a considerable pot of money for themselves.
Consumers are not the only ones to bear these unjustified bank charges: they have a particularly serious effect on SMEs that export their products and the competitiveness of these companies suffers for no good reason.
This situation, which has been incomprehensible to SMEs since the advent of the euro on 1 January 1999, is in danger of becoming explosive, with the euro entering into circulation in less than two months. How is it possible that the euro zone is only a single payment area for notes and coins, with all other means of payment being discouraged by punitive bank charges? How can banks justify a transfer from Lille to Bastia costing less than the same operation between Lille and Brussels?
One fear still remains and that is that the banks will use their freedom to impose charges to increase domestic prices in order to compensate for the lack of earning opportunities in the euro zone. Nevertheless, as Commissioner Bolkestein said, ‘The banks know very well that the public has legitimate expectations’. We can only hope that the banks really are aware of this."@en1
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