Mr President, with regard to this report I must say that my only job – to use a bullfighting metaphor that the House may not understand – was to go in for the kill, because for a year – between 1 January 2001 and 1 January 2002 – the rapporteur was Mr Marinho and then he had to leave it, and it was therefore he who did all the preparatory work and it simply fell to me in the final phase to take up the amendments proposed and bring about some kind of compromise. In the end there were some sixty amendments. Under Mr Marinho there was a hearing with the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market and there was a first stage and a second one with amendments. My job was simply to bring all the strands together. The directive on the use of immovable property on a timeshare basis was approved in 1994 by means of the co-decision procedure and I was Parliament’s rapporteur on this directive. The directive took three years, in principle, to enter into force, but in many countries it was postponed for one year. By the way, I am pleased to say that recently the Spanish Supreme Court passed the judgement that the Spanish Government should compensate private Community consumers for its delay in applying the Directive. I believe that this is a good legal precedent which increases the validity of Community directives. The current Directive is a minimal directive. Certain information obligations were established and also the opportunity for the purchaser to change their mind within a period of ten days, with the sum paid being refunded. But it is clear that, being a minimal directive, it was not going to be able to resolve all the issues raised. In the discussions on this issue in the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market over the last two years, it has become clear that for many Community citizens the current system is doing harm and that we should therefore increase the arsenal of instruments at our disposal. From the point of view of Community law, perhaps we will be faced with difficulties. And the difficulty lies in the current concern in all the Community institutions with regard to simplifying the regulatory procedure. We have the Council’s Mandelkern report, we have the proposals of the Commission on European governance and on the improvement of Community regulation and finally we have the agreements of the Seville European Council, which insist on the need to make progress in this area with the participation of the European Parliament. Furthermore, the present Directive is peculiar in that it involves the field of private law, contract law, property law, which are traditionally considered to fall within the competence of the Member States. Therefore, the road before us is not easy. On the one hand, I believe it is a clearly Community field, in that it involves property sold in one country to Community citizens and with responsibilities which may arise at a later date, and, on the other hand, it is – as I said earlier – a question of private law which would not normally be considered a Community matter. Furthermore, the question is raised of the possible use or limitations of the legislative procedure. It has been suggested for example that other types of measure may be useful in this field, such as measures for cooperation between Member States to combat the forms of money laundering that appear in certain types of timeshare companies or simply certain types of fraud. It mentions the possibility of employing co-regulation or self-regulation procedures, for example through the accreditation of operators in this field and there are a whole series of difficulties reflected in the report. Parliament’s report is a compromise report. There is an exhaustive study by the Commission, but it dates from 1999. I believe that the main conclusion is that the Commission must be asked to study the issue again and to present proposals to us as soon as possible which may be either legislative or non-legislative. Specifically, on reviewing the report approved in committee, we detected an error in paragraph 20, which referred to certain infringement procedures which have already been concluded and therefore that paragraph 20 no longer makes sense and should be removed. And there are also some unnecessary repetitions in paragraphs 6 and 7. I would propose that the House vote against those three paragraphs, 6, 7 and 20. With regard to the amendments presented, there are three – Amendments Nos 1, 2 and 4 by Mr Bradbourn, Mr Lehne and Mrs McCarthy, which relate to the stipulation of specific days – which I believe to be too precise for a non-legislative text. And finally, there are three amendments by Mrs McCarthy, which clarify certain aspects in the field of information and responsibilities, which I believe to be very good. I will end my speech here, Mr President, and I hope the House can adopt the draft report tomorrow.

Political group: PSE