Mr President, as the rapporteur has just pointed out, Community competition law has undergone substantial reform over recent years, which is now culminating in the reform of Regulation (EEC) No 4064/89 on conciliations. It is true that, if we accept the comments of Mr Monti, it is still necessary to make proposals in the field of the public aid proposed, and I wish them every success, even though it cannot be denied that this is clearly a road strewn with dangers and difficulties. In the field of conciliations, it is the case that the reform of Regulation (EEC) No 4064/89 has not been as radical a change as the one which has taken place, for example, in the field of anti-competitive behaviour. This is firstly due to the fact that Regulation (EEC) No 4064/89 was a good regulation, it was a good legislative text, which has allowed us to carry out a suitable Community competition policy in the field of conciliations. In September 2000, on the tenth anniversary of the entry into force of this Regulation, the Commission organised a seminar to discuss it and the opinions expressed by the specialists and sectors involved in it were positive, despite the criticism of certain very specific aspects. Subsequently, the Commission produced a Green Paper containing proposals for reform, which were also partial and specific, which deserved the clear support of this Parliament. We are now debating the report on the proposed reform; Mr Della Vedova has produced a wonderful report and I congratulate him on it. The report contains some very significant aspects, and perhaps one of the very important aspects which should be stressed is that it differs from the Commission’s report on a point on which, at the same time, the Commission differs from the proposal contained in its Green Paper. This is the problem of multiple notifications. These multiple notifications increase the costs for notifiers and affect legal certainty since, in so far as various authorities have to decide on a single concentration, there is always the possibility of contradictory resolutions. And if there was anything on which there was complete agreement it was the fact that the unnecessarily complex rule in Article 1(3), introduced in the 1997 reform, had not contributed to resolving the problem. Therefore, the Green Paper proposed the three-country rule, but now that rule is being forgotten in favour of a system, which is welcome, of two-way communications, either from the national authorities to the Commission, or from the Commission to the national authorities. But maintaining the text of Article 1(3). The truth is that, as I have said, the improvement of these referral mechanisms deserved our applause, but we do not understand the reasons for having forgotten the three-country rule, unless it has been detected that, as happened in 1997, the majority of countries wish to keep in their hands a significant competence to implement policies with industrial content, which is not always necessary. Mr Della Vedova has mentioned the Socialist Group's insistence on the participation of workers and says that this is not the place to deal with it. I cannot agree with that opinion. We must bear in mind that, regardless of whether the conditions relating to efficiencies is reformed, any competition authority, on approving a concentration, takes account of certain efficiencies and there is no question that one of the most important of these efficiencies is the maintenance or creation of jobs, and this being the case, the information the representatives of the workers can provide is important.

Political group: PSE