Strasbourg, 15/03/2007 (Agence Europe) - Addressing the European Parliament in Strasbourg on Wednesday, Industry Commissioner Günter Verheugen said that politics was “not competent” to become involved in the management of the Airbus case. He felt that, while the announcement of the Airbus Power 8 restructuring plan, with its 10,000 planned redundancies in Europe, including 4,300 in France and 3,700 in Germany, “creates uncertainties”, and while there may be resulting calls for political intervention, politics, nonetheless, “is not competent to get involved in the running of companies”. However, Mr Verheugen, promised that the Commission would use all the instruments at its disposal “to help employees who lose their jobs find other jobs”. He said that, to ensure fair competition conditions on the world market, the Commission would submit its arguments to the WTO on 22 March against Washington's disproportionate subsidies to aircraft builder Boeing.
Airbus had suffered from political interference, said French UMP MEP Christine de Veyrac, complaining that the group's governance was “inter-governmental, rather than industrial”. The leader of the Parliament's Socialist group, German MEP Martin Schulz said that management errors were the cause of the difficulties being experienced by Airbus. “It is all the more shocking that it is employees and not shareholders who are having to pay the cost,” he added. Some 20 German, British, French and Spanish MEPs have decided to set up an informal Airbus working group, the aim of which will be to ensure that Airbus employees do not find themselves competing against one another, said French MEP Kader Arif. (eh)