Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-06-19-Speech-2-025"
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"en.20070619.5.2-025"2
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".
Mr President, first of all I welcome the Commissioner’s endorsement of this report. I think it is an important step on the long road which policyholders have travelled in terms of trying to find a solution to their difficulties.
I also want to draw attention to the 70 or so conclusions, recommendations and remedies contained in this report, which are the distillation of what we found. While national regulation has improved, there remain large gaps on how we ensure that financial services are passported to operate outside their country of origin.
For this reason, I want to conclude by drawing attention to the proposal for collective litigation by consumers in national courts. This would make it possible for people who do not have millionaire bank accounts to seek justice in the courts. Collective actions in national courts against transnational companies or national regulators are essential if the principle of ‘no mobility without liability’ is to have any real substance.
I want to thank the rapporteur and the chairwoman for their work, and the Committee staff and members, who worked carefully to analyse the Equitable Life affair and to draw conclusions and issue recommendations. Perhaps even more importantly, they looked at how better to protect European citizens in a single-market environment.
This important and reasoned report concerns the plight of 1.5 million European citizens who had invested for their pensions in Equitable Life, one of Europe’s oldest and most respected and trusted mutual life assurance companies. Hundreds of thousands of people have suffered real hardship because of the failure of national regulation in the UK and in other countries where Equitable Life operated.
The Socialist Group supports this report, but not everyone is equally happy with our committee’s findings, as will become clear from some of the contributions here this morning.
Some argue that the criticism of the UK Government is overstated and that insufficient credit is given to the progress made since this crisis emerged. Be that as it may, the overwhelming value of this report is that Europe’s citizens know that they can come to this Parliament and have their case heard, and we have learned as a result of listening to them how we can better defend citizens’ rights to fair play in a single market.
There can be no doubt that the UK’s so-called ‘light touch’ regulatory approach encouraged the company to oversell over an extended period, thereby undermining its solvency, which led, in large part, to this disaster. No amount of special pleading or niggling over detail can hide that stark fact. It is equally clear that the company management bears an enormous burden for its irresponsible actions.
Bearing this in mind, it is legitimate that Parliament should call on the UK authorities to examine the possibility of providing recompense to those who have in some cases lost their life savings.
It is equally clear that the Commission has neither the will nor the resources to ensure the proper transposition of EU law, nor to follow up on its application in the real world of business. In addition to this, we have found that the Third Life Directive itself has serious deficiencies which need to be addressed.
I would like to refer to the situation of the 8000 or so Irish policyholders, many of whom lost substantial sums. Their difficulty in obtaining redress was twofold. They were led to believe that they were investing in a so-called Irish fund, which, they discovered, was non-existent. They also discovered that the Irish regulator took no interest whatsoever in the operation of Equitable Life before the crisis and had negligently failed to avail of the option under the Third Life Directive to implement conduct of business rules. This effectively left policyholders at the mercy of a UK regulator who denied any responsibility for non-UK policyholders."@en1
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