Brussels, 04/03/2015 (Agence Europe) - At the end of this month, the European Parliament and the Single Resolution Board (SRB) are to launch negotiations to sign a cooperation and information exchange agreement in the framework of the single banking resolution mechanism, to be set in place from 2016.
“There is a mandate, the negotiating team has been set up”, the president of the committee on economic and monetary affairs of the European Parliament, Roberto Gualtieri, told EUROPE on Wednesday 4 March. He added that the discussions would start “in a few days”.
The negotiations, which are due to be launched in Brussels on Monday 23 March, will be chaired by the Portuguese Socialist Elisa Ferreira, on behalf of the parliamentary committee. This dossier will be one of the first to be dealt with by Germany's Elke König, the president of the Single Resolution Board, the European agency which will be tasked with restructuring and partly dismantling failing systemic banks in the eurozone from 2016 (see EUROPE 11222).
The negotiations are not expected to go on for too long, as the EP and the ECB concluded an inter-institutional cooperation and information exchange agreement in 2013, in the framework of the single banking supervision mechanism (see EUROPE 10919). One of the main differences lies in the fact that the SRB is not an institution, but a European agency, and its decisions are generally validated by the European Commission. On the content, however, the agreement could be close to the one concluded with the ECB, a parliamentary source stated.
Gualtieri stressed the “huge responsibility” represented by the democratic control the European Parliament will exercise in the framework of banking union in the eurozone. “With the banking union, we now have a greater responsibility as the only body that has the institutional role to supervise the common supervisor (…). So we are working internally to be fully equipped and well organised in order to exert this role of supervisor of the supervisor, fully respecting its autonomy and independence, but also being aware that banking union is a positive revolution that requires of course an appropriate level of scrutiny and public accountability”, he said. (Mathieu Bion)