Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-05-20-Speech-2-291"
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"en.20080520.26.2-291"2
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"Mr President, I want to get straight to the point. Let me address this to the Slovenian Presidency; I think they have been great in their presidency. Minister Lenarčič, just let me give you four things that I would like you to bring up at your next meeting of the Competitiveness Ministers.
The first thing, is for you to ask the Commission to take the SOLVIT mechanism – which is supposed to deal with every single internal market complaint, not just market-related ones – and put this firmly on the agenda. Get them to circulate the information that is already available on independent websites – and we should be ashamed of the fact that it is actually the people affected by this who have taken this up on their own – there is a lot of comprehensive information, and make that part of their remit. That could happen straight away. So that is your first task.
The second task is that you should be saying to all your colleagues that their business information services (because they have services that reach out to SMEs) should also be circulating that information to them in their own languages and you should be putting just a modest amount of your budget behind to actually explain to businesses what is going on.
Thirdly, give those to your law enforcement authorities. And, also say to the Commission and to the people who are running your consumer protection cooperation: put this on your agenda. It will not take very much to do. The information is there. It is not a difficult thing to do. So that is three things you should do.
And the fourth thing you could do as well is to say to your colleagues this: these practices, if practised on individual consumers are absolutely illegal under the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive. Everybody knows that is the case. And the companies affected are essentially taking on the role of private consumers. But, in individual Member States, in your process of implementing that (and I have to say by the way the Member States have not done very well in implementing it, and even my own Member State is actually well behind), you could easily include a clause specifically including directories and small businesses in your implementation. It would not take much to do.
So there are four specific actions there. So I look to you, Minister, and we will look at the agenda, and we expect it to be on the next agenda of the Competitiveness Council. How can we go round saying to small businesses, ‘participate in the internal market’, if we cannot even give them the simplest of safeguards on a simple act like this? It is a disgraceful neglect by all of us of our duties in the single market."@en1
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