Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-02-11-Speech-3-152"
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"en.20040211.6.3-152"2
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"Mr President, as we have heard, the Parmalat case was a catastrophe for its employees, for investors, for savers, for its creditors, for its customers and indeed for the financial markets. It is our duty as legislators and policy-makers to see how we should respond to that and to see what we can do to try and prevent that kind of catastrophe from occurring again.
How can we ensure that the whistle is blown on this type of criminal conduct before it reaches the catastrophic and disastrous proportions that it reached at Parmalat, before it goes on for years, as it apparently did at Parmalat? I appeal to the House to ensure that our response is proportionate, is measured, and looks at the facts of what happened in a dispassionate way, that we have a thorough analysis of what happened, of what went wrong – if anything – with the regulatory system, and of how we can improve the legal and regulatory framework to try to prevent a Parmalat from happening again.
We can be proud of the fact that this process started before Parmalat happened because, as people have said, there have been scandals throughout the world. Enron is the biggest, but there are others throughout the European Union. Few people were foolish enough to say 'well, Enron happened in the USA and we do not have any problems in the European Union'. If they said that they are obviously feeling rather foolish about it now, but that was not the general response here and in the Member States to the Enron crisis. We looked at what happened and responded to it. That will help us because we have prepared the ground to try to tackle a similarly disastrous event within the European Union itself.
As many people have mentioned, we need to look at the role played by the professionals – the bankers, the auditors, the ratings agencies – that were involved with Parmalat, to see if in the future there is some way of ensuring that they are not taken in, that they are able to assist savers and investors in detecting this kind of fraud, and that they are properly regulated; and to examine whether further regulation would ensure that they are better able to detect this kind of fraud. But we should not make the mistake of trying to turn auditors and lawyers and ratings agencies into policemen, because that simply would not work.
We need also to accept that the kind of obvious criminal and fraudulent conduct that we saw in the Parmalat case is something that can never be eliminated completely. No matter how effective and wide-ranging our system of regulation, you are always going to get fraudsters and criminals who will break the rules. We must focus on better enforcement of the rules and regulations that we have.
In many ways, that is a question for Member States. They need to devote many more resources to their police forces, particularly those specifically dealing with financial crime. That is one of the biggest lessons we can learn from Parmalat. We do not necessarily need to introduce a whole range of new regulation, which may in the end just prove to be a burden on those many market participants who are completely honest. We need more cooperation between our national regulators, not a single European Union regulator. The Member States should devote more resources to fighting financial crime and having a large, effective police force to fulfil that task in the future."@en1
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