Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-09-05-Speech-3-409"
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"en.20010905.13.3-409"2
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".
Mr President, many thanks to Mr Andria for his report on the amendment of the Regulation on the facility providing medium-term financial assistance for Member States’ balances of payments.
Will the candidate countries pose more risks than the current Member States at the point that they become members of the European Union? In my opinion, no. Compliance with the obligations resulting from enlargement is going to mean, amongst other things, cooperation in the monitoring systems which allow us not only to help them to modify and improve their financial systems, but also to have all the necessary guarantees so that their situation may be similar to that of the current Member States. We therefore do not believe that it is necessary to modify the system in this regard.
We believe that when the system is applied to them, the candidate countries will already be members of the European Union and therefore no special guarantee system will be necessary. If they have to receive macrofinancial aid while they are candidate countries, the same model applied to macrofinancial aid would be applied to them.
The third problem you have raised is: who should grant this type of aid, the Bank or the Commission? This is subject to a technical debate. It has not been resolved. I do not believe this is the greatest problem, however; each model has its advantages and its disadvantages, in terms of coherence and speed, and I hope that a solution will be found in the Council. However, for the Commission this is not the greatest problem.
The last point you have raised is: to what extent can the European Parliament be involved in the granting of this medium-term aid for balances of payments? The mechanism which has currently been implemented is based on a fundamental idea: urgency. When we talk about a situation of balance of payments difficulties, we are talking about decisions which have to be taken very quickly and, secondly, with sufficient technical support to allow the financial markets to positively assess the decision adopted.
With regard to urgency, according to the current model, the decision is adopted by the Council on the proposal of the Commission, subject to a report from the Economic and Financial Committee. We believe that this model allows us to respond to the urgency and also allows us to receive the necessary technical support so that loans or aid may be positively assessed by the market. Should the European Parliament participate in this model? In my opinion, it is no accident that the Treaty does not include the European Parliament as an institution to be consulted previously. I believe that this is due to precisely that idea of urgency. But this must in no way mean that the European Parliament does not have the right to receive all the information and know what decisions are taken and why.
In my opinion, we could improve the system by giving information to the European Parliament as soon as these decisions are taken, so that they may have detailed knowledge of them, know why they have been adopted and know all their content. Of course, the possibility of reviewing the regulation in the future, in two or three years, is not a great problem for us and clearly, in the event of a review of the Regulation, the European Parliament must continue to play the role it has played until now.
I would like to thank all of you for your participation on this issue, which is sometimes rather dry, but which I believe is also fundamental to everyone. We must study the mechanisms which, as you have said, will provide us with a safety valve in the event that difficulties may arise in any Member State in the future, as a result of enlargement, difficulties which will have to be resolved efficiently, making full use of the procedures laid down in our Treaty.
In your interventions you have raised a series of doubts and questions which I would like to clarify.
The first fundamental doubt is: can this facility be extended to the candidate countries? You know, and your report clearly expresses this, that this exact model cannot be extended to the candidate countries. This system applies to Member States. Another question is whether we can apply this facility to the candidate countries once they have signed the accession agreements and before they have been ratified, in other words, at the point that it becomes necessary to make more progress on the processes of structural adaptation of their economies.
Does this mean though that the candidate countries do not have any support system to resolve any possible difficulties in this area? Absolutely not. We are still applying the macrofinancial aid system which can be applied to the candidate countries, just as it is applied to any third country.
We believe that that is the thinking behind the model and we believe that if we modify the system, trying to give special treatment to the candidate countries at the point of negotiation, not only would we introduce uncertainty in terms of which countries we apply it to, but we would also introduce doubts into the financial markets if the process of liberalising capital movements generates risks which would lead us inevitably to implementing a mechanism for compensating them.
The Commission therefore believes that it is much more logical to maintain the system as it is at the moment, with the guarantee that, without any doubt, if any candidate countries have problems, the macrofinancial aid system will be applied to them. We believe that any other model would create more confusion and more problems, rather than helping to resolve the difficulties.
The second point that you have raised is the problem of the degree to which the new model implemented may negatively affect the Community budget. I believe that there is no difficulty here. You well know that we have a different model of guarantees, whether we refer to macrofinancial aid to third countries, or whether we do so in relation to long-term aid within the Community framework.
It is true that we grant macrofinancial aid to certain third countries with difficulties. It is also true that we do so in cooperation with other international financial institutions and by applying programmes that have been agreed by them. Experience suggests that non-payment difficulties do not generally arise. There is a risk, albeit a slight one, but it cannot be ignored. That is why the guarantee fund was implemented, allowing us to confront these difficulties in the event of non-payments. And that system must be maintained.
An equivalent guarantee fund must be implemented for long-term aid to Member States of the Union. In our opinion, that situation is not reasonable either now or in the future. When we talk about long-term aid or loans to the Member States of the European Union, we are clearly talking about countries with solid financial structures, bound by Community obligations and therefore not posing any risk in terms of non-payments."@en1
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