Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-02-15-Speech-4-051"
| Predicate | Value (sorted: default) |
|---|---|
| rdf:type | |
| dcterms:Date | |
| dcterms:Is Part Of | |
| dcterms:Language | |
| lpv:document identification number |
"en.20070215.5.4-051"2
|
| lpv:hasSubsequent | |
| lpv:speaker | |
| lpv:spokenAs | |
| lpv:translated text |
"Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, as Mr Almunia has already said, this is an extremely important project. It is concerned with deepening the European internal market, and one aspect of this is giving owners the opportunity to exercise their rights across borders in this internal market. The Committee on Legal Affairs adopted this important project unanimously. We have come to an agreement with the Council whereby, if this House follows the vote of the Committee on Legal Affairs in plenary, the Council will do likewise, and thus we shall be able to achieve a result here at a single reading pursuant to the Interinstitutional Agreement of December 2003.
The first crucial issue with which this Directive is concerned is that of the representation of shareholders at general meetings; that is, the exercise of voting rights not by the shareholders themselves but by intermediaries – representatives – or by means of proxy voting.
There are widely differing rules for this in the EU, some of them highly restrictive. The compromise reached in the end makes representation possible in principle, but subject to a transparent procedure, and also gives the Member States the opportunity of prohibiting representation by national law in the event of conflicts of interest.
A second important area is the issue of the right to ask questions. The problem here is that the traditions and, in particular, related legal consequences, rights of challenge and similar points vary greatly between Member States. The scale ranges from Member States where questions can be asked but do not need to be answered, to Member States where questions have to be answered correctly and, if they are not, resolutions adopted at general meetings can be declared null and void.
A compromise has been reached on this that lays down the right of shareholders – owners – to ask questions in principle, but does enable Member States to make sensible adjustments and also limited restrictions to the right to ask questions in accordance with their own legal traditions, without calling this right into question in principle.
As Commissioner Almunia mentioned, a number of issues could not be resolved definitively with this Directive. This is partly owing to legal systems. An example is the legal relationship between shareholder and representative. Indeed, this has no place in a Directive concerned with company law, as matters such as this belong in contract law, which is why the Council and Parliament subsequently agreed to deal with it in a separate recommendation, a separate legal act.
The same goes for the subject of the languages used. In this regard, the co-rapporteur Mr Klinz from the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs had made the – undoubtedly constructive – suggestion of providing for similar rules to those in the Transparency Directive. Here, too, however, we later decided – following the negotiations – that, in systematic terms, it would be better to regulate this within the framework of a recommendation than in this specific text. Consequently, this issue, too, will have to be resolved in the separate legal act.
All in all, I should say that, from my point of view, we have managed to solve the multitude of problems that existed when we started dealing with this Directive. It is true that they have not all been solved one hundred per cent satisfactorily, there is no question about that – this is normal when one has to reach compromises. Ultimately, however, they have been solved in a way that enabled the solution to obtain unanimous support in both the Council and the Committee on Legal Affairs.
I should like to express the warmest of thanks to my co-rapporteur, Mr Klinz, to the shadow rapporteurs from the two committees concerned – but particularly to Mr Medina from the Committee on Legal Affairs, with whom I enjoyed close cooperation – to the two Chairs, Mr Gargani and Mrs Berès, to the Austrian, Finnish and German Presidencies, which contributed significantly to the success of this project, and last but not least to the European Commission, whose help with overcoming the problems was very useful."@en1
|
Named graphs describing this resource:
The resource appears as object in 2 triples