Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-06-09-Speech-4-054-000"
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"en.20110609.4.4-054-000"2
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"Madam President, honourable Members, I am grateful for the wide-ranging and consistent description of the situation given by the committed Members who are here today. I will inform Mrs Reding about this and encourage her to draw up a comprehensive communication covering the strengths and the weaknesses of current European and national law and to revise the directive on this basis.
It is clear that the 2006 directive has been implemented by the Member States. Therefore, this is not primarily a problem of adapting national law. Firstly, in the event of cross-border problems, the law is often not even applied in many cases, as a result of the less than ideal cooperation between the authorities in the different Member States, and, therefore, these cases are not investigated at all. Secondly, there is often a failure to prosecute. Criminal law is a matter for the Member States, both in terms of setting penalties and of formal investigations of these cases by the authorities, public prosecutors or the courts.
Thirdly, and now I am coming to the heart of the matter, the 2006 directive only covers unfair practices in business dealings between businesses and consumers and not between one business and another. This means that it mainly provides protection for private citizens against these fraudulent companies. It does not protect citizens who are entrepreneurs, sole traders, retailers, businesspeople and tradesmen or who own small or medium-sized businesses against this type of fraud. However, it is precisely this point, extending the scope of the directive to include business dealings between companies, which was opposed by the majority of the Member States during the legislative process at the time. This means that we quite deliberately restricted ourselves on the basis of this directive to European regulation of dealings between fraudulent companies and citizens and not between fraudulent companies and small businesses. European regulation of the issue which you are rightly complaining about on the basis of practical experience was not wanted at the time.
The directive was an ambitious European project and, at the time, the Commission was concerned that the whole proposal would be sabotaged and that there would be no directive at all if it had insisted on extending the directive beyond the relationship between fraudsters and citizens. In the light of the specific examples you have mentioned here and the cases of abuse uncovered by the Commission, it may be possible to broaden the scope of the directive beyond the relationship between fraudulent companies and citizens in the revision which is due to take place next year. We will start work on this immediately.
Finally, there are Member States which have satisfactory provisions under substantive and criminal law covering the relationship between fraudsters and citizens and which prosecute cases of this kind. Good examples include Austria, Belgium and France. There are other Member States, and you have referred to some of them here, where the national regulations are not adequate. We must wait and see whether these Member States will be prepared in the Council in a year’s time to vote in favour of a general, EU-wide, standardised regulation to protect citizens who are also businesspeople."@en1
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