The European Court of Auditors has called on the European Parliament and the EU Council to legislate if necessary to ensure that it is fully able to monitor the banking supervision activities of the European Central Bank (ECB), in a letter sent to Parliament on 14 January.
Since 2013 and the entry into force of the Single Supervising Mechanism (SSM), the ECB has been responsible for directly supervising the largest banks in the euro area within the framework of the banking union.
The Court of Auditors, for its part, is responsible for auditing these supervisory activities, a task that it believes it cannot currently fulfil satisfactorily. However, in its view, the rights of access to information granted by the ECB to the necessary documents and information are insufficient.
Illustrating its statements with three cases in which it has been denied access to important information, and highlighting the lack of progress in its discussions with the ECB, the Court calls on the EU’s co-legislative institutions to: - fully support its rights of access to documents relating to banking supervision, and – if they consider it necessary, to amend the current regulations (1024/2013) so as to clearly stipulate that the Court must have access to any document considered useful.
The President of the European Court of Auditors, Klaus-Heiner Lehne, stressed the importance of effective supervision of banking supervision activities “given the high risks to public funds from banking failures and the complexity of the new supervisory mechanisms”.
According to Bloomberg, the ECB said it was “open to cooperate on the issues raised, and stands ready to engage with the European Court of Auditors”.
The EU auditors had already published two reports on the institutional architecture in place within the framework of the banking union, one of January 2018 on the crisis management mechanism in the event of bank failure (see EUROPE 11940), the other of December 2017 on the resolution plans led by the Single Resolution Board (see EUROPE 11929). (Original version in French by Damien Genicot – intern)