Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-10-08-Speech-3-101"
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"en.20081008.15.3-101"2
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"Madam President, can I briefly respond to a few points made. One relates to the previous debate, referred to by Mr Purvis. I was not invited to the previous debate. I would seldom pass up an opportunity of coming to the European Parliament to hear regular fans of mine on the Left praise my contribution to all things European. I could never miss an opportunity to hear people as eminent as Mr Schulz and Mrs Berès and many others speak about me in such glowing terms, so if I had been invited I would have gladly been here.
Be that as it may, there are only 44 or 45 cross-border financial institutions and we have a supervisory system which is way out of date for such operations.
Finally, may I make this point regarding the current crisis, which I have spoken about here and in other forums including press conferences. There is not one single magic bullet solution to all of this. If there had been, it would have been found long ago. These are unprecedented times and unprecedented responses have been given, both on this side of the Atlantic and in the United States.
Can I just remind Members here – and I am sure President Barroso did so as well in his contribution – that we in the European Commission do our best to coordinate and encourage Member States to give a total response. But, as I said in my opening remarks, these responsibilities lie with Member States, with Member States’ central bankers and with Member States’ ministries, because they are the elected people. They are the people who are in control of taxpayers’ monies and they are the people who must give the responses.
We have attempted – and we have succeeded somewhat – to get a European response in some of these particular areas. May I finally make the point that we must remember the structure of Europe. We are not a federation like the United States. We are not a central government, as found in the 27 Member States, and therefore we can only act to the limit of the powers that are given to us.
Regarding European solutions, I should like to give two examples.
My predecessor initiated an item regarding pay; this was issued in the form of a recommendation, which is possibly the one of the softest instruments that the EU has at its disposal. That was the only chance it had of having anything accepted, because the competence in this regard lies with Member States. We produced a report about a year and a half ago, but only one Member State has implemented most of the recommendations. The others have, by and large, ignored it. The Member State that implemented it – to give credit where credit is due – was Holland. I am not saying it has implemented every exact letter of it, but it is the only Member State that has gone down that particular road.
So a European solution was there. A lot of comment is being made at the present time about the bonus culture and executive remuneration. We tried to come forward with a type of European solution, which was put forward by Mr Bolkestein – I think it was technically me who put it into effect but I give credit to Mr Bolkestein for initiating it. That is what we did, and that is what our report shows.
Secondly, regarding supervision – the main subject of this report – I have spoken on many occasions in the Parliament and elsewhere about the issue of the cross-border supervision of financial institutions. I have spoken at Ecofin and at press conferences. It is practically impossible to move forward on this particular issue because Member States do not want us to have a European solution to this.
However, I should like to point something out to Members of the European Parliament.
Last year I initiated the Solvency II proposal regarding insurance, and advanced the idea of colleges of supervisors, group supervision and group support. Both in the Council of Ministers and in the negotiations with the European Parliament, it has been watered down considerably. If we are to get this directive through in the lifetime of this particular legislature, a lot of heavy lifting will have to be done with the Council of Ministers because there are large divergences, not only on those particular items but on other items as well.
Although I have been in politics for all of my adult life, and have ceased to be amazed at contradictory positions that politicians may adopt – and no doubt, if you look over my long political career, you might find some of them as well – I still find it totally ironic and amazing that, when we advocate a European solution, for example regarding supervision to do with Solvency II, the people who advocate European responses – both Ministers and Members of the European Parliament – are often the same people who come back and lobby for their own national state positions when a particular piece of legislation comes before them.
Those of us who were brought up in the Catholic religion know the prayer of Saint Augustine which says more or less, ‘Make me pure, but not just yet’. It is a bit similar here. This does not surprise me because I have been a politician for all of my adult life so I am used to that type of irony, to put it in its politest terms."@en1
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