15/10/2004 (Agence Europe) - On 11 and 12 October in Brussels, MEPs welcomed parliamentarians from the Western Balkan countries for discussion on the theme of "Privatisation and the European integration process", in the presence of Edward Tersmette of the European Commission's Directorate General for Enterprise. On the basis of the Commission report on implementation of the European Charter for Small Enterprises, signed with Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and Serbia-Montenegro, Edward Tersmette gave a detailed description of the situation of small enterprises in all these countries. Weaknesses are mainly at the level of access to financing, he said, noting moreover that there was a "systematic tendency toward wishing to cut costs", which complicates the emergence of start-ups. During the seminar, MEP Zsolt Becsey (EPP-ED, Hungary) spoke of the impact that the privatisation process will have on the economic activity of a country, whereas Istvan Szent-Ivanyi (ALDE, Hungary) and Edit Bauer (EPP-ED, Slovakia) completed the analysis with comments on the challenges of the privatisation process and gave examples in Hungary and Slovakia.