Udo Bullmann

Agreement on the European Fund for Strategic Investments: Roberto Gualtieri, Udo Bullmann, Fernandes

• Report rights infringement
• published: 28 May 2015
• views: 32

EN & FR - Press conference on the agreement on the European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI, the main instrument of the "Juncker Plan") by Roberto GUALTIERI (S&D;, IT), José Manuel FERNANDES (EPP, PT) and Udo BULLMANN (S&D;, DE) (extracts) - 28.05.2015 - European Parliament, Brussels. Roberto GUALTIERI (S&D;, IT), Chairman: "It's with great joy, I would say, that we can announce that very early this morning, after a long political trilogue, we reached a political agreement on the Fund for Strategic investment. And I think it is a very good agreement." José Manuel FERNANDES (PPE, PT), Rapporteur (en français) "On peut avoir un nouvel instrument, c'est un instrument innovateur, qui est un instrument qui est additionnel, il est complémentaire des autres instruments, pour la croissance et pour l'emploi. (...) L' objectif de minimiser au maximum les coupures sur Horizon2020 [le programme de recherche européen, sur lequel a été pris une partie des fonds d'amorçage, NdlR ] et 'Connecting Europe Facility', on a réussi à avoir 1 milliard d'euros, ce qui permet cet objectif. (...) On va continuer avec cet objectif de minimiser, comme je le dis, au maximum, l'impact sur ces 2 programmes ; cela veut dire que notre travail, sur la question du financement, et pour cet objectif, va continuer, et avec la force qu'on a mise aussi sur ce dossier." (translation int EN) "We can now have a new innovative instrument and it's an addtional instrument - that will complement other existing instruments - to boost growth and employment (...) On the objective of minimizing as much as possible the cuts on the Horizon 2020 and and Connecting Europe facilities, we have succeded to get 1 BN euros, which allows us to meet that goal." We are going to continue with this objective of minimizing as much as possible, like I say, the impact on these two programmes (Horizon 2020 and Connecting Europe). That means that our work on the financing will go on with the same strength that we put into this dossier in order to achieve this objective." Udo BULLMANN (S&D;, DE), Rapporteur: "I think very successfully we managed to have an appropriate governance structure, the leading personnel, the managing director will be co-approved by the European Parliament so we will not see any form under-professionalized, clientelistic selection of people. (...) I think this is a major step forward, we always said, well, the amount could be bigger, this is only a start, we worked also on the lifetime of this instrument. We could imagine in case of success to prolong the exercise, so that we may create a permanent instrument of European Politics. (...) We will not get into micromanagement of projects because that's not our job. We have the engineering tasks (we'll leave the engineering tasks to) with the professional people." Roberto GUALTIERI (S&D;, IT), Chairman: "The basic guidelines are a new instrument that we as a Parliament introduced and the result of the trilogue is now that these investment guidelines that we already approved are in the annex, co-decided. So this goes really beyond a simply indirect political role of control and scrutiny." Udo BULLMANN (S&D;, DE), Rapporteur: "I think we did a pretty good job in hindering politicization from coming into existence, in hindering micromanagement according to wrong allocation systems coming into existence and we rightly and successfully installed objective criteria for better investment and for good governance in this specific European new instrument. (...) For me politicization is, if a Prime Minister can call in, or if a regional minister can call in and tell the European body 'you have - because I'm the Prime Minister - to finance this or that project". The ECON and BUDG Committees of the European Parliament have reached an agreement with the European Commission and the Council on the European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI), also known as the "Juncker Plan". It aims to mobilize a private investment of around 315 bln based on a 16 bln of guarantees from the European budget and further 5 bln coming form the European Investment Banks. The agreement establishes an independent board and objective criteria to pick up the projects that will be financed by the fund, in order to avoid politicization and horse trading with Member States. The EP will participate in choosing the staff of that independent board. The political agreement also foresees that 1 bln euros of unused money from the EU budget be used to cover the financial gap created by the fund in the Horizon 2020 and Connecting Europe Facilities. © Frédérick Moulin 2015 - EU2015 - EP - All rights reserved.