Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-03-13-Speech-4-120"
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"en.20030313.4.4-120"2
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"Mr President, Gislaved, Bengtsfors and Skövde are among the Swedish localities in which many people have seen their lives shattered when large numbers of jobs have been transferred to other EU countries. Through dubious and, in some cases, illegal state aid, tax revenue has been used to move jobs around within the European Union.
One way of defending fair ground rules would be for the Commission – and I am therefore addressing, in particular, Commissioner Fischler, who is present here – to punish the Member States more severely if they infringe Article 87(1) of the EC Treaty. At present, the options for imposing sanctions under this article amount to nothing worse than the possibility of industries’ and Member States’ becoming liable for repaying the illegal aid. They do not, however, have to repay more than the amount of the aid plus interest. The punishment is therefore mild in relation to what has happened. These limited consequences, together with the fact that few infringements of Article 87(1) of the EC Treaty are discovered, have a damaging effect upon the common EC market. The idea of the internal market is damaged through the distortion of competition that occurs when certain companies and certain forms of production are given unwarranted support.
Small localities in Sweden have so far been the losers in the dishonest job trading conducted in Europe. For Bengtsfors and the province of Dalsland in western Sweden, for example, the effects have been disastrous. The Member States must abide not only by the letter of the EC Treaty, but also by its spirit. Naturally, cases such as Bengtsfors lead to people’s confidence in the EU’s internal market being undermined.
I want now specifically to address two questions to Commissioner Fischler. The first concerns whether he considers current penalties to be adequate and sufficiently severe in cases where state aid is given to companies, as a result of which jobs are transferred from one European Union country to another. In such cases, no new jobs are created. Instead, a social mechanism for providing security is swept away.
My second question to Commissioner Fischler relates to the answer previously given by the Commission to a question concerning the transfer of jobs in Bengtsfors in Dalsland to Portugal. Does the Commission believe that structural aid must in the future be redesigned in such a way that new undertakings and new jobs are given priority instead of jobs being transferred from one place to another?"@en1
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