Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-11-23-Speech-2-043"
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"en.20101123.5.2-043"2
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"Madam President, thank you very much to Mr Rapkay for his report on behalf of Parliament’s Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs.
State aid distorts competition. Therefore, the treaty contains provisions for declaring it incompatible in a whole range of cases. Operating aid can only be authorised if it is likely to have positive effects. Our regulation proposes a plan to mitigate the environmental impact of the use of coal in order to offset the negative effects of the aid.
Finally, my third point is that when the objective of the operating aid is to contribute to a transition towards closing uncompetitive mines, it is clear that this closure must be gradual and cannot take place only when the deadline arrives. This gradual nature must be clearly set out in the closure plan, and the plan must also include a diminishing proportion of that aid during the transition period.
Our proposal therefore establishes a linear reduction in aid by a percentage that clearly aims for the removal of aid at the end of the transition period.
Having said all this, I would once again like to thank Mr Rapkay and everyone who contributed to the report that we are considering. We will consider Parliament’s position on the report, and we are continuing the debates in the Council, naturally in consultation with the Belgian Presidency. In light of Parliament’s position and based on what the Council’s position turns out to be, the Commission will, of course, give its opinion in the next few weeks.
The Commission has closely analysed both the report and the amendments proposed for this debate with great interest, and we have taken note of the fact that the report specifically supports extending the deadline for closing uncompetitive mines to 2018.
The Commission is also aware that in recent debates that have taken place in the Permanent Representatives Committee (Coreper), the majority supported the 2018 deadline, as Mr Rapkay’s report suggests.
When we prepared the proposal for a regulation and analysed this situation, we in the Commission were, of course, fully aware of the social and regional impact of the closure of coal mines in certain regions of the EU. However, when drawing up the regulation, we also took into account the fact that some of the mines are not competitive and have only survived so far thanks to constant injections of public money and public subsidies. Therefore, in our proposal for a regulation, we allowed the Member States to grant additional operating aid, but on this occasion, for the specific purpose of facilitating the gradual closure of uncompetitive mines.
I would like to discuss three points that are considered in the report.
Firstly, the proposal to grant operating aid or investment in order to make the mines competitive. There was already a similar provision in the previous regulation concerning aid to the sector. However, the previous regulation largely failed to achieve the desired effects and, rather than guiding the coal mines towards profitability, it created a moral hazard to some extent.
The mines were subsidised in the vain hope of achieving profitability. Now we have to deal with the consequences: we need to extend this special system for coal production because the mines concerned have not achieved profitability, nor have they been closed.
In any case, the mines that have credible forecasts of profitability do not need State aid and can obtain the required capital from the capital or financial markets.
Secondly, I would like to explain why, in our proposal, we consider it to be necessary to have a plan to minimise the effects on the environment. Article 3(1) of our proposal mentions this point."@en1
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