Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-02-13-Speech-1-115-000"
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"en.20120213.17.1-115-000"2
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"Madam President, one recurrent demand of all those who view many things here as being too bureaucratic and too centralist has certainly always been: we need to be able to feel that Europe is a reality. I find that the very fact that we are now making decisions here together means that we are taking a step towards a European spring! Things are warming up, we are beginning to feel like leaving our homes and getting together with other people. I come from a region which has Switzerland and Germany as its immediate neighbours. Once, I had to pay a traffic fine in Lindau: DEM 5. Because I was very late responding, it went up to DEM 10. However, after all the bank transactions had been carried out, I ended up paying DEM 70: that is, seven times more than the original charge, or 14 times more, depending on how you look at it. These are the kind of trivial things which make people absolutely furious and cause them to ask: we are supposed to have something in common with our European neighbours, but what exactly? Today, we can finally get a feel for what it is we have in common, now that it is not going to cost us any extra.
Secondly, a great number of small and medium-sized enterprises have always done business abroad. Even Austrians – would you believe it? – do business abroad, in countries like Germany and the Czech Republic, in particular, but also in all other parts of the expanding Europe. Moreover, the costs of transferring money used to be far from inconsiderable. We are talking here about pretty large amounts – 0.25% of the cost of the transaction. After some painstaking negotiations, this was then reduced, in most cases, to one eighth of the transaction but, in the case of some transfers, the fee shot up even further. There was a need to run multiple accounts, which greatly complicated the whole bookkeeping process, and when the authorities wanted to make appropriate checks, they proved to be much more difficult and inefficient.
It is good that we are finally getting to the point that we are at now. However, it is also true that we wanted this to happen much earlier. This is a step in the direction in which we all want to be heading, namely having greater transparency about cash flows and joint cash flows. In that regard, I reiterate that it would make me very happy if we took more of these kinds of initiatives that would bring us this kind of European spring."@en1
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