Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-07-03-Speech-1-059"
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"en.20060703.13.1-059"2
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"Mr President, this is a rare occasion for me: I have more than one minute’s speaking time and for once I am not going to disagree with anyone!
I should like to emphasise one or two things that have been said and look at them from a slightly different perspective. There are a number of practical issues that Ms Wallis touched on, as indeed did Sir Robert Atkins. The reality is that we have had many potential witnesses on our list; we have heard a few; and there are a great many more that we need to hear if we can. That includes many of the most important witnesses.
Another practical problem is that too many of these witnesses have come forward at the same meeting, so there has been very little time to interrogate them. There has been no real cross-examination; they are not under oath; we have not been able to subpoena them; and there is the practical problem that flows from the inevitable requirement of interpretation. Taken together those are fairly serious weaknesses, although the committee is collectively doing its very best to overcome them.
To give you an illustration of what I am talking about, the British Government turned up en masse. A spokesman for the Treasury, the Financial Services Authority and the Government Actuary all arrived together, clearly having rehearsed their parts to the nth degree. They hunted as a pack, they stood together and we were unable to prise them apart or to check facts because they had come to admit nothing and to concede nothing. Even their answers to specific questions were evasive. To give you one vivid illustration, they denied that the Government or the equivalent department had any knowledge of problems with Equitable Life ten years before we knew – and we have proof that they did.
With regard to the point about shared management, which has been raised by others, it seems to me that, in this case, shared management is turning out to be no management at all. The Irish thought that the British Government was checking on Equitable Life. If they were, they were saying nothing. So, the Irish were kept in ignorance.
If today, for example, a Latvian financial services company started conducting business all over the European Union, it seems each Member State would assume that the Latvian Government was itself satisfied, but that would not necessarily be the case. This is not a reflection on Latvia, just an example. However, if that company was outside the European Union, every Member State would check thoroughly. That is a problem."@en1
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