Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-02-15-Speech-2-418-000"
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"en.20110215.25.2-418-000"2
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"Mr President, I think that we can be satisfied with Mr Barroso's statements on the amendment of the Treaty. Of course, it is now up to us to draft our opinion, and we must do so before 24 March, as an important Council meeting is taking place on this date. Can we reach a majority in favour of a simplified procedure? We shall see. I think that there are still some conditions that need to be met.
The first condition that occurs to me is that we need to try to ensure that the mechanism is managed by the Commission as far as possible. I have some good arguments for this. You will surely have noticed that on 6 January, the European financial stabilisation mechanism (EFSM), which is managed by the Commission, issued EUR 5 billion of bonds onto the market over five years. On 25 January, the European Financial Stability Facility, which is intergovernmental, did the same, also for EUR 5 billion and also over five years.
The bonds that were managed by the Commission were issued at 2.5% and those that were managed by the intergovernmental system were put on the market at 2.89%. That means that the EFSM, which is managed under the Community method, is issuing bonds at lower interest rates than the intergovernmental system. I wanted to make this point because it is important to show that the Community method has much better outcomes than the intergovernmental system does.
Secondly, I think that we must also ask ourselves if we can use the amendment of Article 136 in order to strengthen the economic governance package which is currently under discussion. Mrs Wortmann-Kool and other rapporteurs have tabled six proposals. In these six proposals, however, we still need the green light from the Council so that the procedures can be initiated by the Commission. This problem can also be resolved through Article 136. We could say that if Article 136 – that is, the permanent crisis mechanism – is invoked, the Commission will automatically be able to start this procedure, and that the Council will not be able to block this with a reversed qualified majority. Thus, there is a real automatic aspect to the penalties. That is a second observation that we will perhaps have to come back to in our opinion, as I have said to Mr Brok and Mr Gualtieri, the two rapporteurs for our committee.
I would like to make a third and final comment. Mr Brok and Mr Gualtieri, as rapporteurs, you must try to obtain statements and assurances from the Council, not on the current package, but on all the things that have been announced in these last few days: the competitiveness pact, the intergovernmental method, the many countries who oppose this, etc. There is a real divide in the Council on this issue for the time being. I think that we must have an assurance from the Council that it will also apply the Community method in this second economic governance package. Why is that? It is because the intergovernmental method is not working. Imagine for a moment that the rules on competition in the European Union were managed by the Council! How many times would fines have been given to businesses which failed to apply the competition rules? A company or a private business would never have been fined because it had failed to apply the rules on competition in the European Union. The same is true of these rules, and that is why I am making a plea for the two rapporteurs to try to get an assurance that the Community method will also be applied in the second economic governance package."@en1
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