Informele Ecofin-bijeenkomst: financiële stabiliteit prioriteit in EU (en)

Today, at the Informal Ecofin meeting in Brdo pri Kranju, the Ministers and Governors agreed on further steps to develop financial stability arrangements in the EU. At the press conference, the President of the ECOFIN Andrej Bajuk summarized the outcomes as follows:

First, on financial stability, we today signed a Memorandum of Understanding that will replace the corresponding MoU signed in 2005. This strengthens co-operation mechanisms around cross-border groups and commits all signatories to co-operate across border, both in normal times, and in crisis situations. This is an important step forward, as the Memorandum reflects the commitment of all EU authorities to deepen cooperation in concrete ways and to ensure that coordinated actions can be taken in cross-border financial crisis situations.

Second, on financial supervision, we also agreed on ways forward on a number of key issues requested by the Spring European Council:

We agreed to invite Member States to give a European mandate to national supervisors. This means that the national supervisors will have to take into account the European dimension in their work for a more convergent implementation of EU regulation. We agreed to further improve the functioning of our Committees of Supervisors. The role of the European Committees of Supervisors for the banking, (CEBS) insurance and occupational pensions (CEIOPS) and securities (CESR) should be reviewed and the Committees should be tasked to contribute further to supervisory cooperation and be given a role on alerting on financial stability in Europe. There is broad agreement that the legal status of the Committees should not be changed.

We agreed to more widely use colleges of supervisors to re-enforce the supervision of cross-border groups. Colleges already play a useful role in the present supervisory framework. Their role in organising co-operation and the sharing of information should be strengthened and further developed. We also acknowledged that making any progress on the home-host issue particularly depends on addressing the question of burden sharing.

We agreed that we should continue to work towards enhancing consistency in the supervision of financial groups operating in more than one Member State, regardless of the location. Therefore, the work on the convergence of regulatory and financial reporting should be speeded up. Through continued convergence of practices, rules and reporting in Committees and Colleges we can achieve a further improvement of cross-border group supervision and also ensure an appropriate information flow to address financial stability concerns at EU and global level.

Ministers and Governors stressed that progress on the roadmaps agreed on these areas in 2007 will need to be implemented in a determined manner. The Ecofin will come back to this issue at its next meeting with formal Council conclusions and update the existing roadmaps.