Mr President, I shall add my voice to those of my fellow Members who have congratulated Mr Huhne on the undeniably high quality of his report and on his feeling for compromise. If the report is adopted, these qualities will allow decisive progress to be made in one important aspect of the unification of financial markets. Indeed, I believe that all of us here are convinced of the advantage of making swift progress and bringing this to a speedy conclusion, avoiding a set of conciliation proceedings desired by nobody. Conciliation is what remains when compromise has failed, and, as a matter of fact, I feel that the compromise we have reached is relatively satisfactory. It is not perfect for anybody, but it does not damage anybody’s interests, and therefore constitutes a promising starting point. We had several problems, but we have obtained a satisfactory result in terms of the choice of competent authority. That is a victory for Parliament. I believe that this is a cause of which the rapporteur was a great supporter, and he has won the day. Our worries related, first of all, to the conditions of issue of the passports and the time limit for dispatching them. It was necessary to find a balance between, on the one hand, the swiftness required by organisations wishing to invest and, on the other, the thoroughness with which their applications should be scrutinised by the competent authority. On this point, the compromise is satisfactory. The matter of the language regime was equally irksome for us. It is of the essence that everyone should understand what is at issue here. The common position may be less than perfect, but I feel that it does offer sufficient safeguards. The competent authority’s delegation of certain tasks to a more technical agency awoke intense worries within my group, relating to what I will term ‘Lamfalussism’ run riot. By this I refer to the phenomenon of being induced to entrust activities of almost regulatory dimensions to technical, specialised agencies, lacking in transparency and subject to minimal controls. It was vital to establish a time limit after which this type of delegation would no longer be possible. The committee’s report allowed for no such thing, but the compromise does. It establishes eight years as the term for this possibility. That is a long time, but at least we can be sure that, when it has elapsed, the possibility for this type of delegation will have expired. I believe this is a very good thing. Finally, there was the matter of convertible bonds. Should convertible bonds be treated as equity securities? On this point, the compromise relinquishes a committee vote which we found unsatisfactory, for convertible bonds should be treated as equity securities. We are fully reassured on this important point. That, Mr President, is why I believe that we should all vote in favour of these amendments and adopt the proposed compromise. Mr Turchi’s amendments will remain on the table. They are interesting, of course; but they open a Pandora’s box rather than a debate. These are intelligent amendments, but since they cast doubt on many aspects of the definition of securities, it is better to close Pandora’s box once more so as to obtain a sound decision quickly, as the rapporteur hopes and as our group desires.

Political group: PPE-DE