Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-09-05-Speech-3-395"
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"en.20010905.12.3-395"2
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"Mr President, since another member of my Group has given up his speaking time, I believe that I have accumulated additional time. In any event, I will not use it up.
I personally support this measure unreservedly; and the fine-tuning which has been introduced by means of amendments in this Parliament are simply a demonstration of a desire that this power be used prudently, as I am sure the Commission is going to do.
Perhaps it is the case that in other respects the Commission’s proposal is not fully in line with what was approved at the time by the European Parliament. Specifically, at the time this Parliament favoured a genuine procedural regulation which would regulate the logical principles of any judicial regulation, even if it was simply by incorporating the customs which the Directorate-General for Competition had introduced over almost forty years. In this regard, the Commission’s proposal has been more timid than in other respects, but, in any event, if the amendments contained in the Evans report are adopted, or those still maintained by this parliamentary Group, this shortcoming may be corrected.
There are other points on which perhaps our satisfaction is not complete. It is true that there is no single standard in the field of the guarantees of process or rights to defence. But those of us who come from a country where the same principles are applied to administrative penalty procedures, with a constitutional guarantee, as to the criminal procedure, and the same rights are granted to physical persons as to legal persons, would have liked this standard, this level of guarantees, to have been raised in accordance with the amendments approved by the Committee on Legal Affairs, which have not been incorporated into the text. However, at the end of the day, in my country we say that ‘the best is the enemy of the good’ and there is absolutely no doubt that this is a good regulation which we are supporting.
Mr President, Mr Evans – whom I congratulate on his report – was absolutely right when he said that this is a very important issue, although it is also true that questions relating to the reform procedure in the field of competition do not inspire interest amongst the citizens, despite their importance for the economic world.
However, personally, I must confess that, for me, to participate in the reform of the rules on the procedure in the field of competition gives me particular personal satisfaction. Because to participate, although in a very modest way, in the process of repealing Regulation 17 of 1962, against which I have fought a long-standing battle and on which I have written repeatedly in a very critical manner, is, I must confess, hugely gratifying.
But at the burial of this regulation, and may it be well buried, which I have always seen as wretched, perhaps at this time, with due respect for the dead, we should a pay slightly fairer tribute by recognising what has been good about it historically.
Regulation 17 made some sense at the time it was approved, that is, in 1962, when the application of Community competition law was being born, which could justify a centralisation of the powers of the Commission, in a Community of seven countries with less than 200 million inhabitants. But the problem with Regulation 17 was not its creation or the rules it established at the time of its creation. The problem has been its maintenance for almost forty years, during which conditions had changed radically. Anybody who had contact with the Commission’s procedures in the field of competition was aware of the dissatisfaction caused by its application.
Finally – and fortunately – the Commission has opted to yield to the evidence and promote the derogation of this Regulation, replacing it with a more up-to-date regulation, in line with the views of the White Paper on the modernisation of the Community rules in the field of competition.
In the report produced on the White Paper, this Parliament had the opportunity to express its favourable opinion, although with some fine-tuning in certain cases. This fine-tuning was perhaps related to the reticence of certain members of certain countries which had had a decisive influence on the creation of their national system and a fundamental influence on the Regulation of the procedure. Of course, I did not feel this reticence. I believe that the new approaches in the field of Community competition law not only constitute an enormous effort to modernise that Community law but also an effort in the right direction.
Today we are being presented with a legislative text which, to a large extent, responds to what had been anticipated in the White Paper. And it also, to a certain extent, takes up some of the observations made at the time by this Parliament.
It is the case that in some respects the proposed regulation has surprised us with extremes which had not been laid out in the White Paper. I am referring specifically to the provision of Article 7 on the possibility of adopting structural measures as a result of a decision on a case of prohibited conduct. This consists, no more and no less, of adopting measures such as the splitting up of companies, particularly of those which have abused their dominant position. As you know, these measures are normal in United States law. Hence the Microsoft case and the famous case of the seven sisters, the splitting up of the Rockefeller oil company, possibilities which are enormously innovative within European law."@en1
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