Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-04-24-Speech-4-047"
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"en.20080424.6.4-047"2
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".
Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, the IAS system makes sense for big listed companies that operate worldwide. That is why, during Parliament’s last term, we decided, on the Legal Affairs Committee’s proposal, to adopt the IAS Regulation.
The ultimate aim – as Alexander Radwan has said – was indeed to achieve convergence, at least with the USA and if possible worldwide. The system makes no sense in the case of small and medium-sized companies because, as a rule, they have no need of international financial markets, no need of Wall Street and the rest. For that reason alone, the necessity of developing IFRS for small and medium-sized companies is highly questionable.
On top of that – and I think Commissioner McCreevy was entirely right here – the current proposal is for nothing more than a slimmed-down version of what are, by any measure, extremely complicated international standards, entirely unsuited to the structure of small and medium-sized companies in Europe. They are particularly ill-suited to family companies, which have been run by their owners for several generations; which have already written off property belonging to them; and in which the application of fair-value rules would simply encourage greed and, in the end, could very well jeopardise the companies’ chances of survival.
On the other hand, we must be realistic. Ultimately, the question of accounting standards for SMEs in Europe will not be exempt from some form of pressure for harmonisation. Our demand is for comparability, at least within the Single Market. So I think it is important that we should seriously consider how to develop European alternatives to the proposals from London, with the aim of achieving greater standardisation in this area too – but standardisation that is sensible and appropriate for SMEs and geared to the long term, rather than short-term valuation.
I have one further point to make about the IAS bodies. There is a real problem here, as Alexander Radwan has outlined. There may be a certain geographical balance but there is no balance in terms of economic weight. Europe is by far the largest bloc, the largest region in which the IAS rules apply. That is why we must have a commensurate say, and we simply cannot be compared with somewhere like Australia. Australia carries the same weight as a middle-sized EU country or, indeed, a big region like North Rhine-Westphalia. The balance needs to be improved in this respect."@en1
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