Madam President, we must bear in mind that the powers of investigation and control available to the supervisory authorities in the financial field are incomparably greater than those which exist in other fields. In the financial field – to a large extent because there is public concern about credit and savings, including, therefore, companies which use the securities market – there is a public interest in safeguarding the interests of huge numbers of third-party savers who put their confidence in companies which manage other people’s money while the real owners of that money have no capacity to intervene in that management. The protection of the interests of third parties justifies a high degree of intervention by the public authorities, which leads, amongst other things, to very great powers which provide the authorities with information about the internal affairs of companies. There is no doubt whatsoever that, if the data obtained as a result of the exercise of these authorities were to be made known to third parties, this could not only cause irreparable damage to the bodies under investigation, but could also cause serious fluctuations, and ultimately changes, in the market. Therefore, as a counterbalance to such broad powers of investigation, the authorities are obliged to keep the information secret. That duty of secrecy, taken to the extreme, could hinder certain objectives pursued by the control authorities, which, ultimately, consist of ensuring that the markets behave properly. There is no doubt that one of the areas in which the phenomenon of globalisation has had the most obvious effect is the financial field, in which the large companies use the securities market. Today large companies operate in many countries, but there are no supranational supervisory authorities and furthermore the Community authorities find it difficult to carry out their work outside their own borders. Ultimately, we are talking about issues which involve sovereignty. To sum up, the problem is that the authority supervising the activities of a certain country cannot itself access the data relating to the activity of that company, its parent company or its subsidiaries in other countries because its powers of supervision do not extend beyond the borders of the country to which it belongs. In order to resolve this problem cooperation is needed between the authorities of the various countries. This cooperation, amongst other things, has to take the form of an exchange of the data obtained. The problem is that this exchange generally involves a degree of non-compliance with the obligation to secrecy. It is therefore necessary for the regulations to provide for a way to overcome this conflict between the obligation to secrecy and the exchange of information, and to seek balanced solutions to the problem. With regard to the European regulations, after the previous unstable regulation which furthermore was different for the different sectors, in 1998 the first banking sector directive was amended to allow Member States to reach agreements on the exchange of information with third countries, on the condition that the information exchanged was subject to guarantees of professional secrecy at least equivalent to those in force in the European Union. Now, by means of this directive, the corresponding amendments are being made to the other financial sector directives, in the same way that they were made in the case of the banking sector directive. Just as we agreed with the 1998 amendment, and for the same reasons, we are going to support these amendments in the terms proposed by the Commission. A final comment. We are currently awaiting a report by the European Parliament on the review of the SLIM initiative aimed at simplifying the legislation on the internal market. What has happened in this field may be very significant and it may have very beneficial consequences. If we want to simplify the legislation, it will also be necessary to reduce the number of regulations and rationalise the initiatives. We should consequently ask the question why, when the banking sector directive was amended in 1998, the directives on insurance and collective investment, that is to say the ones that are now being amended, were not amended at the same time. The simplification and coherence of the legislation may perhaps have required this.

Political group: PSE