Brussels, 21/04/2005 (Agence Europe) - In January 2004, the disagreement between Parliament and Council over the amount of remuneration for MEPs seemed to have put off the adoption of a common statute for MEPs indefinitely. The Luxembourg EU Council Presidency has patiently joined up the threads of dialogue and is expected next week to propose a compromise that will perhaps allow the statute to be adopted, as Jean-Claude Juncker had promised during the presentation of the Presidency programme at the European Parliament in January.
The Presidency is expected to take advantage of the informal meeting of European foreign ministers to be held next Tuesday in Luxembourg to sound out national delegations. Based on the principle that the whole project that was on the table in January 2004 was acceptable except for the amount of MEPs' remuneration considered excessive by four Member States (Germany, Austria, France and Sweden) but on which the Parliament did not plan to compromise (EUROPE 8631), the Presidency will simply suggest correcting this amount bringing it to 7,000 per month instead of 8600 as requested by MEPs. So that this amount is easily acceptable, especially for Italian and Austrian MEPs who currently earn more, a “phasing out” mechanism will be applied during the first legislature. The new composition of the Parliament should also help to make a more reasonable salary acceptable. The remuneration of the Polish and Slovakian MEPs is little above 2,000 euros. Before their arrival the MEPs earning the least were the Spanish MEPs, at 2,618 euros a month.