Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-10-23-Speech-1-104"
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"en.20001023.9.1-104"2
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"Mr President, I am going to talk about Mrs Riis-Jørgensen’s report. I want to begin by congratulating her on a very good report.
One of the absolutely basic principles of EU cooperation is that competition between different companies, products, countries and regions should work well and be fair and correct, as well as be for the benefit of consumers. Allow me to begin with something said by Adam Smith, the father of economic liberalism, in 1776, to the effect that people in the same industry seldom meet for pleasure or diversion without their conversations’ ending with a conspiracy against the general public or some device for raising prices. Certainly, a good deal has happened in the last 200 years or so, but we have the same aspirations today. If the internal market is to operate, we must have active institutions which look after issues of competition. Commissioner Monti is to be congratulated in this respect.
Paragraph 16 of Mrs Riis-Jørgensen’s report talks of increased legal certainty where applications for mergers are concerned, together with more effective and shorter timeframes within which to appeal before courts. This applies particularly in view of the fact that, in dealing with mergers, the Commission has something of a double role. The Commission both supervises and applies the rules of competition. This double role makes special demands in terms of openness, control and predictability.
The second paragraph I want to mention is paragraph 18. It is of general relevance, but its point of departure is the planned merger between motor manufacturers Volvo and Scania. As is well known, the Commission opposed this merger, which in turn led to an extensive debate about how the rules of competition operate and how market shares are to be calculated and assessed. A clearer definition and further discussion are needed in this area. As long as the internal market is not complete, it is mainly large companies in small Member States which can lose out in competitiveness to companies elsewhere in the world. How are large companies with large home markets to be able to merge and compete in a global market if the EU’s rules make this impossible? Coming as I do from a small country, I myself am very pleased, therefore, that the Committee should have adopted the amendments I proposed in this connection. I hope that the Commission is now also prepared to broaden the discussion and shed more light on the rules of competition on the basis of these assumptions."@en1
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