Speech at EBA launch
By Sharon Bowles MEP
I am pleased to be here and I congratulate all the staff who have worked to convert CEBS into the fully fledged European Banking Authority.
Of course your tasks are only just starting, apart from the well-known stress tests, you will have many technical standards to draft for the common rule book and I know that the list of what you have to do or monitor is getting longer from all the legislation that I am seeing - and indeed, as this week, maybe from some of my own amendments.
Both as Chair of the Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee and as a UK MEP, I welcome the Authority´s new chair Andrea Enria and Executive Director Adam Farkas to London.
We have met before - indeed you could say that I have presided over the European Parliament´s version of stress tests, otherwise known as your competency hearings. Future meetings will hopefully be less stressful.
The Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee has had a fruitful dialogue with the level 3 committees like CEBS, which were the precursor to the new Authorities. I am sure that this dialogue will flourish even more now with EBA given that we are actually meant to engage with you - perhaps here I ought to explain to the uninitiated that in times past, the Commission was a little jealous of others getting advice from the advisory committees. Those times of course are long gone.
However, as a result of that contact with the level 3 committees, and actually well before the financial crisis, the Parliament proposed that the committees should be upgraded to agencies or authorities. So we were pleased when, following the De Larosiere report, this became a reality in the legislation that we agreed last year - although we could have done without the financial crisis that brought it about. So for my part, this is not merely a crisis response, it is part of an evolutionary process which was dictated by logical needs in a single market for financial services.
Now, negotiating the supervisory legislation was not without its struggles, which I can characterise as finding a compromise between the ambition of the Parliament and the caution of Member States, and maybe this is how it should be.
But negotiation was long and hard, and I should mention the personal commitment of Commissioner Barnier to attending some long and fractious negotiations (when you have 5 rapporteurs, a host of shadows, plus extensive teams from two Commission directorates and the Presidency, somebody is bound to be having a bad day!). My job in chairing was certainly eased by consistent high level attendance. And I think the end result was indeed a fair compromise with movement on all sides.
Of course the Parliament retains its vision that the ESAs will grow and that the present arrangements are the start of a journey that should be evolutionary - continuing to combine ambition and caution.
It must be clear of course that Parliament would never have had the confidence to push for strong and independent European Supervisory Authorities if we had not been satisfied with the level 3 committees and our dealings with them. Our only real dissatisfaction with them was their lack of power.
Recently, as I mentioned, my committee held interviews and hearings for all the chairs and executive directors. You may have read or heard about some manoeuverings for inter-institutional and procedural reasons, but the discussions were in general very interesting with considerable thought being given to the challenges and interactions faced in the European supervisory system.
With both Andrea and Adam we discussed stress tests - the real bank ones - and from our own questions and other things that we have said, and probably will do so again next week in Strasbourg, I am sure you will recognise that the position of the Parliament is for tougher stress tests with much more transparency. This is closely linked to being able to obtain a real recovery in the sovereign crisis which I consider unlikely to be settled until there is a better understanding by ordinary citizens of the interconnection of banks with each other and sovereigns, and that this is why it is more of a shared crisis.
The EBA, as well as being part of this highly important topic, also faces other challenges - not least in that the budget and staffing levels are not as high as we would like to see. So although we may have tough debates at times, the Parliament does support increases in resources and an independent budget line for the ESAs.
So, welcome to EBA, and to Andrea and Adam: you have a big contribution to make to the new European system of financial supervision. Parliament is on your side - I know you have ambition, share it with us and we will help you to grow.
ENDS