Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-03-07-Speech-1-071"
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"en.20050307.11.1-071"2
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"Mr President, it is exactly five years since the European Parliament began its dialogue with the European Investment Bank in an own-initiative report. I was already your rapporteur five years ago and I can therefore bear witness to the extraordinary progress those five years have seen in the quality of the dialogue between the European Investment Bank and the European Parliament, in the quality of that dialogue with civil society and in the matching of the European Investment Bank’s policy with the tasks assigned to it since the European Union was formed.
I would therefore like to begin by expressing the heartfelt gratitude of all of us who were already present during the last legislative period and, I hope, of all who will now be taking an interest in the European Investment Bank’s work and its contribution to the implementation of European policy. Warm congratulations and thanks, too, to the EIB’s directors with whom we maintained this dialogue.
It has been a demanding dialogue, a rich dialogue, with genuine interaction on both sides. We have changed our perception of the EIB and the EIB has changed its own perception of its responsibilities.
I would therefore like to take advantage of the few minutes allotted to me to sum up the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs’ unanimous report and underline the five most salient points of our report, in questioning terms of course.
Firstly, we can no longer be content with talking about Lisbon and Gothenburg, we now need to try to make progress in clarifying the objectives. The EIB recognises that it exists to assist European Union policy; it needs to adopt criteria, quantitative indicators, in dialogue with Parliament.
Secondly, we in the European Parliament were among those calling most strongly for the European Investment Bank to make loans to small and medium-sized businesses. However, that can only be done by means of global loans, which are made to banks, and the banks distribute the credits. In this case, we risk losing the ability to check that these loans are consistent with European Union objectives and we need to find a way of checking where these global loans have gone
obviously.
Thirdly, it has to be possible to extend this microcredit policy to an area that is very important in a society that is both a knowledge-based economy and also an ageing economy. I am speaking of third-sector enterprises that provide assistance to individuals and families.
The fourth problem is that a potential conflict emerged during the hearing we held. The European Investment Bank is making a lot of effort to offer cheap long-term loans to local and regional authorities. Attractive as these loans are, however, they obviously come up against the limits imposed by the Stability and Growth Pact. The tendency to get around that difficulty by making loans to private businesses guaranteed by the State obviously introduces an ‘off-balance sheet’ risk. We suggest that the European Investment Bank should emulate the European Central Bank in adopting rules of ethics.
Finally, my last point: in the first version of my report we noted the criticism voiced in certain sections of the press, mainly outside the European Union as it happens, regarding possible conflicts of interest involving senior EIB management staff because of their past activities at the head of large private undertakings that might benefit from EIB loans. Since then, the EIB has sent us a whole series of new internal codes designed to avoid such conflicts of interest or at any rate to take account of them by dealing with them before they arise. I have therefore tabled an amendment which I believe has been taken up by all group coordinators or shadow rapporteurs, thanking the European Investment Bank and noting the details it has provided following our vote in the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs."@en1
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