Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-05-02-Speech-3-164"
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"en.20010502.11.3-164"2
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"I apologise to Mrs Cederschiöld for mistiming my arrival and arriving after much of the debate. We had an opportunity in the committee for me to have an exchange of views with Mrs Cederschiöld about her report. I would like to congratulate her on the overall thrust of the report. My concerns are twofold, however. First, I am concerned about the size of the larger notes, particularly the five hundred euro note that is going to be issued, which is far larger than the largest note in common use in the United States, in the United Kingdom and in Japan.
It obviously makes it attractive for counterfeiters, if they are going to counterfeit notes, to counterfeit large denomination notes, rather than smaller denomination notes and I am slightly concerned that this very large note will, if you want, make the euro the counterfeiter's currency of choice. Secondly, at the same time, of course, it will enable those people engaged in money laundering – I know this is not a report on money laundering, but it is a connected issue – to also move their ill-gotten gains around fairly easily and fairly simply. The amount of money that can be put into a small suitcase will be roughly ten times larger than it would have been if we had restricted the currency to smaller notes.
There is a threat and an opportunity with the introduction of the euro. Firstly the threat is the counterfeiting and clearly, if that happens, it will drive people away from the euro, will have dire consequences for its use around the world if people are badly stung by that, but secondly, we have an opportunity at this period of time to actually catch people engaged in money laundering, as they make the change. We do not have, or we do not apparently have in place, any mechanism across the European Union to try and take advantage of that opportunity, or to try and deter at the point of introduction of the euro the threat of counterfeiting. It is all very well having something up and running later, but if I was organised crime, the time which I would be trying to engage in counterfeiting on a large scale would be around the period of introduction of the euro when you are going to have four hundred million people in the European Union and billions of people around the world who have never been familiar with the notes themselves.
So I think that there is a threat there and I hope that the Commission and the European Central Bank, although it is probably too late to consider whether to issue a five hundred euro note, will actually consider whether they should issue it at the beginning of the process when there are so many dangers attached to it."@en1
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