Frankfurt, 28/12/2001 (Agence Europe) - The first meeting of the European Central Bank's Governing Council (chaired by Wim Duisenberg) will take place in Frankfurt on 3 January, two days after the physical introduction of the euro (see above). It will be followed by a press conference. The Governing Council will then meet as normal once every fortnight (on Thursday, 17 January, 7 February, 21 February, 7 March etc until 1 August when there will be a break until 29 August). They will normally only hold a press conference after the first meeting of the month (7 February, 7 March, 4 April, 2 May, 6 June, 4 July, 12 September, 10 October, 7 November and 5 December). In addition, as is standard practice, two of the meetings will not be held in Frankfurt - the 7 February meeting will take place in Maastricht (the Netherlands), and 4 July in Luxembourg.
In the light of experience gathered during the first three and a half years of its existence, the ECB has partially redistributed the responsibilities of its individual members with effect from 1 January 2002 in order (as a press release explains) to "maximise the synergies" between ECB business areas without changing "the collegial responsibility of the Executive Board". The President, Wim Duisenberg, will deal with communications, internal audit and the Secretariat and language services; Vice-President Christian Noyer will deal with administration, legal services, planning and controlling (taking over the latter from Ms Hämäläinen); Sirkka Hämäläinen will cover operations, payment systems and risk management; Otmar Issing will cover Economics and Research; Tommaso Padoa Schioppa will no longer supervise payment systems but will taken on international and European relations (including the ECB Permanent Representation in Washington DC) and prudential supervision; Eugenio Domingo Solans will take charge of IT systems and statistics.