madam president i would like to begin by congratulating the belgian presidency on its negotiating skills and commissioner barnier and his team for finding solutions on supervision
but i would like to turn to those unresolved issues of financial transactions at yesterday's ecofin
i seem to spend a lot of my time in parliament asking for people to conduct research write impact assessments and do studies
this week's ecofin has gone out and done just that
instead of looking at purely political concepts and legislating in haste the council meeting and commissioner šemeta's contributions have been based on facts and figures
a good example of better regulation principles in practice
however when an independent assessment states that one member state would end up collecting in excess of seventy of the revenue generated from a financial transaction tax it would be ludicrous to claim that such a tax should be implemented at an eu level if at all
an ftt is not free money as the popular media would have us believe
the banks and financial intermediaries would not be the ones to pay for a transaction tax
it would be the pensioners reliant on their returns in the market and companies in the real economy paying for every hedging transaction
it is time to recognise the limitations of the simplistic ftt and if our true aim is to modify the behaviour of banks without destroying our economies look at the more complex solution of a financial activities tax or bank levies as proposed by the imf instead
instead of derailing the process by calling for unachievable and unwanted eu-wide taxes that many member states not just my own are against we must look at this as an opportunity for strengthening our members states weak public finances and allowing them to use the money as they see fit replenishing their public coffers depleted by bank bail-outs and crisis management
