Mr President, the Commission’s proposal on financial collateral arrangements establishes the European legislative framework for this type of arrangement and is an essential proposal in terms of the functioning of the financial market on a European level. This proposal is an essential element of the package of legislative proposals intended for this purpose. The main objectives of the proposal, in a very summarised form, are to guarantee the existence of efficient and reasonably simple systems for the creation of collateral under either title transfer (including repo) or pledge structures. To this end, it is necessary to introduce certain modifications into the legislations of various Member States, especially in the field of the regulation of pledges and also in the field of insolvency law and tendering procedures. In summary, it is a question of creating a sound and efficient regime for limiting credit risk and thereby ensuring a reduction in its cost and, at the same time, improving the functioning and stability of the European financial markets. From the European Parliament’s point of view, the main problem raised by the proposal was that of the subjective scope of application of the Directive. The initial proposal consisted basically of reducing the scope of the Directive to financial institutions and to very large companies other than financial companies, that is, large commercial, industrial or service companies, whose capital base exceeds EUR 100 million or whose gross assets exceed EUR 1000 million. The European Parliament, or at least the rapporteur, considered that this proposal raised two problems. Firstly, the removal from the scope of the Directive, and consequently from its benefits, of the majority of companies which are not strictly financial; not only small and medium ones, but also large companies which do not reach those very high quantitative thresholds which I have mentioned. Secondly, the setting of quantitative thresholds raises the problem of their revision and updating. The proposed directive resolved this problem by means of the technique of delegating this updating within the Commission, assisted by the Securities Committee, the so-called ‘Lamfalussy Committee’. This is a legislative delegation, a delegation of powers which is unacceptable to Parliament, or at least to part of it, as is well known, since this is not the first time we have dealt with the Lamfalussy Committee, in this field and in others, with Commissioner Bolkestein himself. The amendment which Parliament intends to introduce in this field consists, essentially, of the following: removing the reference to quantitative limits and, instead, establishing the requirement that, in these cases of agreements with commercial or industrial companies, the other party to the agreement, normally the taker of the collateral of the creditor, should be a financial entity. This solution has the advantage of resolving, at the same time, the two problems I mentioned, that is, the problem of the exclusion of not very large companies and the problem of the delegation of powers – or of the Lamfalussy Committee, shall we say. Apart from this amendment, which in turn takes the form of several amendments, there are others relating to the formalisation of agreements and evidence of the provision of collateral, the regulation of the right of use for pledge collateral and to other issues which I will not expand on. Mr President, I must end by pointing out – and this is very important – that, from the outset, I have tried to work in close contact with the Commission and with the Belgian Presidency, whose help, in both cases, I am very grateful for at this time. The purpose was to achieve a consensus which would make it possible to approve the proposed directive on first reading or at least to reduce the second reading to a mere formality. We based our approach on this intention, since most of the actors, both the Member States and the actors within industry, agreed on its importance and on a basic consensus, except on certain points, in relation to this proposal. It appeared that this objective had been achieved, since it appeared that the Council’s working group had reached an agreement which also satisfied Parliament’s essential intentions. At the last moment the initial agreement in the Council’s working group has been broken and tomorrow, possibly, in Ecofin a different agreement will be approved, which includes other points which Parliament has not been able to consider in detail. I therefore fear that the aim I referred to earlier of dispensing with the second reading, or at least reducing it to a mere formality, will not be possible, and we will have to continue working on this directive from next month. In this event, for tomorrow’s vote, I would ask you to vote for the amendments which were approved in the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs with slight modifications and to vote against an amendment which has been introduced in Parliament at the last moment, since the lack of consensus in the Council, that is to say, between the Member States, has also led to a rupture in the consensus which had been expressed in this Parliament’s Committee on Economic Affairs.

Political group: PSE