Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-04-07-Speech-4-015-000"
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"en.20110407.3.4-015-000"2
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"Mr President, Mr Maystadt, Commissioner, as you know, the Group of the Greens/European Free Alliance is traditionally very attached to the EIB. We believe that it is an extremely important public policy instrument, and it is because we are very attached to it that we are also very demanding of it – the two go hand in hand.
Our view of the EIB is that, ultimately, it is a bank in its own right, and as such, it is subject to bank constraints, which must be taken into account. Several of my fellow Members rightly referred to the fact that the EIB ought perhaps to take account of new constraints linked to the banking sector. At the same time, it is a truly exceptional bank, because it is indeed funded by taxpayers’ money. It is also there to do what the others are not doing, and to adopt rules that go beyond what the private sector can do.
I should like to stress one or two points on which I feel that the EIB could do even better, even though progress has been made in recent months. The first point concerns the issue of tax havens. This is an extremely important fight not only for us, but also, I think, for a very large majority of my fellow Members in this House. The crisis showed that tax havens obscure, undermine and weaken the entire financial system and the world economy.
Therefore, in this report, the majority of MEPs support the idea that you should ensure an even greater degree of transparency with regard to loans that you grant to businesses and which pass through tax havens. I believe that that practice should be stopped. I am well aware that you have operational constraints on the ground, but there is a political point here, which is that, if you are the power behind Europe, you have to fight battles. If you fight battles, then I think that the battle against tax havens should be one of them.
As for us, we would obviously like to go further; in other words, we would like you to attach conditions to EIB loans to businesses that are not part of the entire value chain in tax havens and which are, at the very least, on the OECD’s blacklist, which is currently being revised.
The second point that we wished to raise concerns the issue of monitoring and governance. Mrs Goulard spoke about this just now. I believe that we should extend the choice, that we should increase the level of joint accountability so that the choice of projects involving taxpayers’ money is made as democratically and as transparently as possible.
The third point is about measuring the benefits of your action. You measure them in financial terms too, of course. As I was saying earlier, you are a bank in your own right, which means that you have challenges to meet in terms of the risk/reward ratio. However, you aim to provide other benefits too, and that is why public money is used. You aim to provide benefits in terms of social cohesion, in terms of the fight against poverty, in terms of environmental protection. I think that you could make still more progress in reporting, in measuring these non-financial benefits, which are at the very heart of your action and of your legitimacy. I think that, rather than setting the financial benefits against the non-financial benefits, you should carry out as broad an assessment as possible, and not limit it to monetary and financial issues alone.
Lastly, the final point of my speech will relate to climate change. The report specifically states that you must pursue all the EU’s objectives. One of the official objectives of the European Union is to ensure an 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. This will not be possible if we continue to finance coal-fired power plants, which have a 40-year life span and which emit huge amounts of CO
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