The European Parliament's Conference of Presidents  decided this morning following  a proposal by Guy Verhofstadt, President of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, to promptly convene a public hearing of all those implicated in the falsification of Greek public accounts. In light of the crisis in Greece and recent speculative attacks on Greek debt, the conference of Presidents has decided to organise a hearing that will consider what lessons must be learned in order to defend and protect the Euro and the Eurozone in future.

This hearing will be organised immediately under the aegis of the Committee of Economic and Monetary Affairs chaired by Sharon BOWLES (ALDE, UK). Representatives of the European Commission, Eurogroup, the ECB, Eurostat, the Greek government, Goldman Sachs, and all other financial establishments concerned with this affair will be invited to attend.

"This hearing is not intended to look for an easy scapegoat in Goldman Sachs, although its practices pose serious problems elsewhere especially concerning its participation in the current wave of speculation on Greek debt. The goal is to understand how and why the entire political and administrative chain, from Athens to Brussels passing through Frankfurt, could have ignored the dressing up of Greek public accounts ", declared Guy Verhofstadt.

Adina-Ioana Vălean MEP (Romania, PNL) has hailed today's European Parliament's vote in favour of enabling the European Commission to gather energy infrastructure information that will help shape future European energy policy.

The proposal requires that Member States collect and notify data and information on key investment and decommissioning projects.  This will empower the Commission to identify potential future demand and supply gaps as well as obstacles to investment.

Ms Vălean, who was rapporteur for the report, welcomed Parliament's endorsement:

"We need the Commission to gather sound information on energy infrastructure investment.
 
"Citizens and companies across the EU need to know that their future energy supplies will be affordable, sustainable and secure.
 
"The data that the Commission will now be able to gather should lead to the smarter energy policies that will achieve those ends.
 
"But the Commission must also protect the sensitive information that it will gather and ensure that it does not amount to a burden on enterprise: that is the way to buy in trust and good will from citizens and industry alike."

NOTES TO EDITORS:

Explanatory Statement from the -- on the proposal for a Council regulation concerning the notification to the Commission of investment projects in energy infrastructure within the European Community and repealing Regulation (EC) No 736/96 --  (COM(2009)0361 – C7 0125/009 – 2009/0106(CNS)):

This is a proposal for a Council Regulation (Consultation procedure) which aims at ensuring that the Commission is accurately and regularly informed of investment projects in EU energy infrastructure, in order for it to be able to perform its tasks, in particularly its contribution to the European energy policy. This regulation replaces in fact a similar regulation from 1996 (which, itself, is a reformulation of a regulation from 1972). The repealed regulation is considered outdated, because it does not reflect the important changes that have taken place since 1996 in the energy field (EU enlargement and security of supply issues, renewable energies, climate change policy, new EU role in the field of energy under the Lisbon Treaty).

The Regulation requires that, every two years, Member States (or the entity they delegate this task to) collect and notify data and information on certain types (specified in an annex to the regulation) of investment projects concerning building, modernisation or decommissioning of production, transport and storage capacities (planned or undergoing). These cover oil, natural gas, electricity, bio-fuel, as well as carbon dioxide produced from these sources. The regulation places an obligation on energy undertakings to provide the necessary data to their own member state. It also specifies the content of the notification (capacities, location, timetable, technologies used in the interest of security of supply, carbon capture systems or retrofitting mechanisms, as well as comments on delays of obstacles on the implementation of the projects).

In order to avoid double reporting, if notifications of investments are required under other specific EU legislation, Member States will be exempted of the obligation to notify such investments.

The information will be kept confidential, but the Commission will be able to publish aggregated data [1]. It will also provide every two years a cross-sector analysis of the structural evolution and perspectives of the EU energy system and any other specific analysis needed. This would allow for an identification of potential future demand and supply gaps as well as obstacles to investment. This regulation intends to make more transparent projected demand and available (or planned) supply.

With these analyses, the Commission will be in a better position to promote best practice and to establish greater transparency for market participants. To develop common views on these issues, the results of these analyses would be discussed with stakeholders and published.

A review of the regulation is scheduled five years after the entry into force.

Guy Verhofstadt, on behalf of the ALDE Group. – Mr President, first of all let me come directly to what I would call the most urgent problem today. We can talk about 2020, but we have a more urgent problem today: the eurozone and Greece. We have to find solutions to that.

I think we, the European Parliament, have to take the initiative in this field. It is important to determine what exactly happened in Greece. Today we received contradictory information. Greece says that it has given all the information to the European Union and European institutions. At the same time, the European Commission and Eurostat are saying that they did not receive all the necessary information. At the same time the investment banks – Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank – are minimising what they have done in the Greece case.

I therefore think it is the task of this Parliament to organise hearings with the relevant committee as quickly as possible, so that we can hear all the parties concerned on this matter and find out exactly what is happening in the case of Greece. We cannot talk about remedies, about solutions, about reforms in the European Union if first of all we do not know what really happened in the case of Greece in 2008 and 2009 and before that, and I think it is absolutely necessary that the different parties are heard by this Parliament.

The second point is that we also have to tackle the problem of the Greek debt. I think there is only one good solution to that. Yesterday I read the article by George Soros in the Financial Times on the matter, and a few days ago I read the article by Joschka Fischer in the German press. He is saying what many people are saying: the best solution to the Greek debt is a European solution – euro obligations, or a European monetary fund, without any costs to the European taxpayer, but with a solution for the future. I think it is also the task of this Parliament to ask the Commission and the Council to reflect on that possibility and to go beyond the national interests of the current Member States of the European Union to examine this possibility.

Thirdly, I think the most important part of this debate is, naturally, what to do about 2020. I think Greece is a very good example of what went wrong with the Lisbon Strategy. The Lisbon Strategy was too weak; the gap between the German economy and the Greek economy widened over the last 10 years: it became bigger, not smaller, after the Lisbon Strategy. What we need – and it is the first decision to be taken by the Commission and the European Council – is to recognise that the open coordination method was not a good method; it was too weak a method. We need a bolder instrument inside the European Union. This bolder instrument is economic governance inside the European Union.

Mr Barroso, I hope that in a few days’ time, at the beginning of March – I think it is 3 March – you come forward with a paper on this. I hope it will include a bolder strategy than the things that were concluded or not concluded at the informal summit. It is still an intergovernmental, open‑coordination method. They make it a little bit better, a little bit faster, but at the end it continues to be an open coordination method based on intergovernmentalism. What we ask from you is to take the lead on that, on this economic policy and on this economic governance, and to come forward, together with Olli Rehn, with a bold proposal to have economic governance inside the European Union. It is nonsense to have monetary union on the one hand and not to have an economic and social and political union on the other. The problems with Greece are proof of that.

(Applause)

I think this is a time when we can expect something bold from the Commission, and I hope that on 3 March the Commission will propose a document that is far more ambitious than the – in my view – disappointing conclusions of the informal summit.

(The speaker agreed to take a blue-card question under Rule 149(8).)