Yritysostojen valvonnasta
12.03.2007
Prudential assessment of acquisitions and increase of shareholdings (debate)
Monday, 12 March 2007 - Strasbourg
Piia-Noora Kauppi (PPE-DE ).
??? Mr President, like all my colleagues before me, I too would like to thank our rapporteur Mr Klinz. All in all, we can be satisfied with the outcome of this directive. It supports a valuable aim: facilitating consolidation of the financial sector in Europe. Without fluid financial markets, other forms of market integration will fail. The financial world must show the way; it cannot be prevented from making decisions about investments and mergers by arbitrary restrictions, as has been the case until now.
From now on, the rules for national authorities will have to be transparent and strictly prudential in nature, and I am hopeful that they will stick to the letter of what has been agreed. No more pseudo-prudential protectionism, please! The decision by the competent authority on approval or rejection of the action should be as swift and as expedient as possible. Just as has now been agreed in the directive, we are in favour of very tight deadlines for decisions. Furthermore, actions which target investment gains first and foremost, and which do not alter ownership structures, need not arouse the kind of national fears we are seeing in the market. Consolidation in the financial sector should, as far as possible, be about market incentives and conditions, not political considerations.
On the aggregation of holdings, let us also remain faithful to what has been agreed. If the decisions on holdings are made by independent investment entities, there is no need to aggregate holdings inside one group of companies. We have conglomerates in this market and we need to guarantee that independent actors can act freely. This also concerns the hedge funds mentioned by my colleagues. |
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