Brussels, 28/09/2000 (Agence Europe) - The EcoFin Council that French Finance Minister Laurent Fabius will be chairing on Friday will be very short, as it will begin at 11.30 and end after the working lunch. It will be preceded, from 9.00 hrs., by a meeting of the Eurogroup in which the finance ministers of the twelve countries of the Euro Zone (Greece will take part even though it will only officially join on 1 January of next year) should raise some major issues: the situation of the euro, outcome of the Danish referendum, price of oil, how to follow up the G7, IMF and World Bank meetings that have just taken place in Prague. Over lunch, Mr. Fabius will brief the other three delegations on the results of the work..
It is also in the informal context of the lunch that the Fifteen will have talks with Vice-President Kinnock and Commissioner Schreyer on the financial impact of the Commission's reform, this policy debate risking to prove to be tense at times (see EUROPE of 27 September, p.15). The Council session as such will be dominated by the problem of combating money laundering, the French Presidency hoping to reach a political agreement on strengthening the 1991 Directive, whereas ministers will also prepare the "jumbo JHA-EcoFin Council" which, in Luxembourg on 17 October, will be wholly devoted to this problem (see EUROPE of 25/26 September, p.9).
The Council's agenda comprises one other topic: Implementation of the conclusions of the "EMU Statistics" Group. At its 5 June session, the Council had taken note of a second report by the Economic and Financial Committee (EFC) on the state of work relating to the needs for statistical information in the framework of EMU. Sharing the concerns expressed by the EFC, it had: - called on the fifteen Member States to make an effort to produce the national data necessary for the timely compilation of reliable statistics in key-sectors for the EU and the euro zone; - urged the Commission (Statistical Office, Eurostat) to draw up, in close collaboration with the European Central Bank, an action plan defining progress urgently required, for each Member State and for each statistical sector, as well as proposing possible changes to existing statistical regulations; - invited the EFC to examine this plan of action and report back on the situation for this September session. EUROPE recalls that the action plan covers the following fields: main aggregates of national quarterly accounts, quarterly statistics of public finances, statistics on developments within the labour market, short-term statistics and statistics on external trade.