Brussels, 03/03/2005 (Agence Europe) - The internal market Commissioner, Charlie McCreevy, announced on Thursday his willingness to work with the European Parliament and the Council with a view to amending the proposal for a Commission directive on the liberalisation of services, but only on the basis of first-reading amendments tabled by the European Parliament. The Commission is therefore not going to withdraw the proposal that is on the table, “which is not our proposal, but that of the previous Commission”, but instead - in order to respect the continuity of the institutions - will continue with the legislative procedure underway and wait for the outcome of the European Parliament's first reading before amending the proposal, McCreevy explained to the press. (See page 11 also). McCreevy said there was no time to lose. He would help to build a broad coalition in order to move things forward. He said that the most important thing was for the European Union to have a services directive that would boost the economy and job creation. The commissioner did not wish reveal what he thought the thrust of the amendments would be. He said that the Parliament should first be allowed to carry out its work. It was its task to table amendments, which the Commission would react to. Nonetheless, he indicated that the Commission intended to exempt from the services directive health services and services of general interest that are financed by the State, which he said were particularly sensitive areas. However, there should not be too many exemptions, as he did not want to end up with a services directive that contained so many exclusions and exemptions that it was not worth the paper it was written on. As regards the extremely controversial country of origin principle to be applied to service providers, McCreevy recognised the need to clarify and deal with a number of problems stemming from this principle. The Commission would also reinforce the message that the services directive would not undermine the directive on the posting of workers, thus preventing social dumping. McCreevy admitted that there were, of course, differing opinions within the Commission, as there were within the European Parliament and the Council. He denied that the Commission had yielded to recent pressure from Germany and France by announcing that the text would be amended. He said that when he was appointed Commissioner, he had promised to take on board people's concerns and that Mr Barroso had already stated one month earlier that the directive, which the Commission had inherited without providing any input to it, would not go through as it stood.