Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-05-18-Speech-2-512"
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"en.20100518.34.2-512"2
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"Mr President, I will be brief: I agree with the observations of all the Members of Parliament who have spoken in this debate.
As regards the European Investment Bank, I took immediate action after taking up my position as Commissioner for Industry and Entrepreneurship to meet President Maystadt and urge him to deliver the EUR 30 billion allocated to help small and medium-sized enterprises from the European Investment Bank. This is what I promised Parliament in my hearing, before it entrusted me with the job of Commissioner for Industry and Entrepreneurship.
To continue, the President’s response was quite positive: he told me that, after an initial freeze, some EUR 6 to 7 billion of the EUR 30 billion allocated had reached the intended destination. I urged the President to speed up the delivery times.
There is also a problem concerning the banks in our area – a point raised by the last speaker – because the European banking system is quite diversified: not all banks are the same. Some banks engage in financial speculation, but fortunately, we still have a banking network where the manager knows the businessman who goes to ask for credit, and so he can trust him, and also knows that the money he invests will be reinvested in the bank, and that what happened in the United States will not happen here.
The meeting that I organised a few days ago, which was attended by many of your European Parliamentary colleagues, was really aimed at this: at developing a strategy. This is why I said that we have set up a forum that will later lead to an action plan for providing credit.
The aim is for our small and medium-sized enterprises to be competitive. For them to be competitive, there must be innovation, but innovation is impossible if no funds are earmarked for this purpose. Hence, my primary commitment to involving the banks – even the banks supplying credit. Many of them have committed themselves to doing this in the future. We are taking strong action, with stimulus from the Commission, involving banks and financial operators and also the European Investment Bank, which sent two vice-presidents to take part in the debate. The aim of this action is to achieve at least some of these objectives, in the conviction that small and medium-sized enterprises represent the best instrument today for emerging from the crisis and – as I said at the start of my speech – for preventing the economic and financial crisis from turning into a social crisis.
You can count on my total commitment to defending, protecting and supporting small and medium-sized enterprises – and that also applies to financial aspects – in the hope that they will be able to grow, and that new businesses will spring up, because our goal is still the same as ever: with a market economy that allows small and medium-sized enterprises to become increasingly competitive, we can create a genuine social policy, in the words of the Treaty of Lisbon."@en1
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