Negotiators from the European Parliament and the Romanian Presidency of the Council of the EU still failed to reach an agreement on Thursday 14 March, on the reform of the European financial supervision architecture (see EUROPE 11864/1).
According to several sources, however, it is not yet possible to speak of a “failure” regarding the negotiations, but simply of a lack of time to complete all the points. The co-legislators will hold a final meeting on Tuesday 19 March in the hope that this time a positive outcome could be reached. The regulatory time required to finalise the dossier before the termination of office of Parliament is indeed almost over.
At the heart of the negotiations remains governance (see EUROPE 12207/15), but a special agreement seems to be emerging.
By way of reminder, three options have been tabled before the 'trilogue' (see EUROPE 12213/23). On Thursday, however, the European Parliament proposed a new option in support of option C, which maintains the status quo in terms of the composition of the executive board within the European Supervisory Authorities (ESAs), but increases the powers of its president. This means that the Romanian Presidency of the EU Council would have returned with a compromise proposal that sets out several similarities with this option.
The new option proposed by Parliament assumes the composition of the current management board – which was to be replaced by the independent executive board – namely a president and six members of the board of supervisors (or BoS) and proposes to maintain the adoption of decisions by a simple majority.
In exchange for this concession to the EU Council, he is calling for the significant strengthening of the President's powers and a stronger involvement of Parliament in his appointment procedure.
Under this option, the Chairperson would also have a casting vote on the decisions adopted by the management board and would keep his or her casting vote within the BoS.
The President could create internal committees for the tasks assigned to him/her and could also set the agenda as well as convene BoS meetings, in addition to presenting items to be decided upon.
In some instances, the President would be empowered to prepare and draft decisions for submission to BoS. These decisions would be adopted by means of a written procedure according to which the decisions would be deemed endorsed unless a simple majority of the voting BoS members objected. Voting BoS members would have 5 days to vote and any abstentions would not be taken into account in calculating the votes cast.
However, all is not yet won and the question of governance still remains open. Option A from Parliament, which tried to balance the composition of the independent executive board with 3 BoS members, 3 independent members, and a president, would remain on the table, according to our information.
The question of financing was not discussed on Thursday due to a lack of time. However, according to one European source, the solution towards which the co-legislators are moving would be to maintain the current system divided between a contribution from the EU budget and a contribution from the competent national authorities, while adding the option to have “voluntary contributions from Member States or observers”. (Original version in French by Marion Fontana)