Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-05-16-Speech-2-370"
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"en.20060516.40.2-370"2
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".
Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, this Parliament attaches a great deal of importance to the issue of the democratic control of the European Central Bank. On behalf of all of the members of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs, I imagine, but also on behalf of the Commissioner, I should like, if I may, simply to deplore the fact that this debate is being held at such a late hour. If we want the issue of monetary dialogue to be taken seriously, then it seems to us that a decision as important as the replacement of a member of the Executive Board should not be taken at such a late hour. All the more so given that, for us, it is a question today of defining our position on the issue referred to us by the Council concerning the last replacement of a member that has sat on the Executive Board of the Central Bank since the outset and of the last appointment that will be made before 2010. This appointment is therefore important with regard to the content of monetary policy.
As rapporteur for the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs, I must point out in this House that, following a vote within the ECOFIN Council, the candidate put forward by that body, whose appointment must be validated by the European Council, required a majority vote in order to be presented as the candidate supported by our Parliament. In that consultation procedure, the profile expected of the candidate is one of possessing the necessary authority and professional experience in the finance or banking sector. Those are the terms of the Treaty. The candidate proposed to us clearly meets those criteria.
The issue that was, in fact, very much the driving force behind the work of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs was a certain anxiety with regard to the circumstances in which the debate was conducted in the Council. At a time when everyone acknowledges that monetary policy is an independent policy, when the political power does not have much to say and when practically all of the members of Eurogroup and ECOFIN have criticised the monetary policy when it came to raising interest rates, this appointment has not been the subject of any debate whatsoever. That is why, at the same time as assessing this candidature, we sent a letter to the President of ECOFIN, Mr Karl-Heinz Grasser, the main points of which I should like to go over in this House.
We looked into the selection procedure of members of the Executive Board and we therefore question the Council on two aspects of that procedure. The first concerns the system of rotation of membership on the basis of nationality. I, for my part, understand that the main economies of the eurozone must be represented on the Executive Board, but that opinion is not shared by all of the members of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs. In any case, the issue of how members of the eurozone are represented on the Executive Board was raised by members of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs, while that of the size of the Executive Board was not, for its part, mentioned.
Next, the issue of the diversity of backgrounds represented on the Executive Board was also a matter of concern for the members of our committee, based on this idea that we perhaps need people within the Executive Board of the Central Bank who come from different backgrounds so that, when the monetary policy of the entire eurozone is at stake, all of the different points of view can be expressed.
Our committee felt that, in the long run, the Council should be able to hold a genuine and open debate, with guidelines, on the profile that should be proposed by the Member State, which would have the opportunity to appoint a member by respecting the diversity of the member countries of the eurozone. We believe that the European Parliament should have the right to a vote of approval, as the members of the Commission do.
That is the spirit in which we composed this letter to the President of ECOFIN. I believe that all of the members of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs, with the entire institution behind them, are open to dialogue with the Council, thanks to which we will have a better and totally satisfactory procedure in 2010."@en1
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