Speech: Remarks by Vice-President Dombrovskis at the ECOFIN press conference

Thank you Minister Kažimír.

Let me begin by congratulating the Slovak Presidency on all their achievements and thank them for a very collegial approach over the past six months.

Today's weighty ECOFIN agenda is a clear indication of the good progress we have made under their stewardship. But also of the very substantial body of work we are taking forward to reduce risk in the financial sector, support investment, coordinate sustainable economic policies, deepen EMU and modernise our tax systems.

Let me begin with our work to complete the framework for Europe's banking sector.

Reforms over recent years have made Europe's banks more stable and resilient. They are better capitalised and therefore better able to withstand economic shocks. Over the past year, there have been times when markets have been volatile. European authorities and European banks have shown themselves ready and able to cope.

The EU has a strong framework in place to maintain stability. I was able to confirm today that the Bank Recovery and Resolution Directive and Deposit Guarantee Scheme Directive have been transposed by all Member States.

But to complete the framework, more work is needed.

On EDIS - the European Deposit Insurance Scheme - we welcome the technical progress reported by the Presidency today and its indication of the areas we will need to focus on during the Maltese Presidency.

Technical Discussions on a common backstop to the single resolution fund have now started and should be taken forward in earnest.

And in the coming months, we will need to make progress on the EU Banking Reform package I presented to ECOFIN today.

To reduce risk, we propose to introduce into EU legislation standards agreed by the Basel Committee and the Financial Stability Board.

To support lending to companies and households, our package builds on our analysis of the responses to our Call for Evidence - our public consultation on all financial services legislation. We would make our legislation more proportionate for smaller banks. We would support lending to SMEs and encourage infrastructure investment.

We had a good discussion on our proposal today. Overall on many issues our proposals seem to be a middle ground between positions of different Member States. We saw a particularly broad support for our proposal on creditor hierarchy and so I hope we can move this forward very quickly.

I also touched upon our legislative proposal which would enable Central Counterparties to be recovered or resolved; in the unlikely scenario this were necessary. This proposal complements the risk reduction measures in the EU Banking Reform package to make our financial system safer.

We have also strengthened stability in the area of non-bank financing as an agreement has been reached on Money Market Funds.

Ministers considered the good progress we are making towards improving the investment environment by building a Capital Markets Union.

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  On Prospectus, a deal is in sight - hopefully even this week - to make it easier, cheaper and quicker for companies to tap financial markets.
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  On proposals to overhaul legislation governing European Venture Capital Funds and European Social Entrepreneurship Funds the Council seems to have found common ground, and this should formally be confirmed in the coming weeks.
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  And we understand the European Parliament is about to agree its position on our proposal for simple, transparent and standardised securitisation.

The first wave of CMU measures should be in place by the middle of next year - enabling us to focus on new priorities.

ECOFIN also discussed plans to boost investment more immediately through the European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI) 2.0 proposal.

EFSI 2.0 would increase the EFSI's total investment target to at least 500 billion euros by the end of 2020. It builds on the success of the existing EFSI which is already expected to mobilise 154 billion euros across the EU.

Today, ministers agreed a general approach on this proposal. I would like to thank the Slovak presidency for reaching an agreement so quickly and my colleague Jyrki Katainen for his commitment to pushing this forward.

In parallel to EFSI 2.0, the Commission wants to take forward work to overcome specific barriers to investment and improve the investment climate. ECOFIN endorsed this priority in its conclusions.

This brings me to the Autumn Economic package we presented to ECOFIN, made up of the Commission's Annual Growth Survey; the Alert Mechanism Report; our opinions on the Draft Budgetary Plans of euro area countries; and our recommendation for the euro area.

The focus remains on supporting investment, pursuing structural reforms, ensuring responsible fiscal policies and making sure our growth is inclusive. This was the first debate on this package. We saw broad support for the AGS priorities and our approach to the Alert Mechanism Report. As regards draft budgetary plans, they had already been discussed in Eurogroup yesterday since these concern specifically euro area countries. There was broad endorsement by ministers. ECOFIN will come back to these issues and adopt the documents in January.

ECOFIN also took stock of the progress made towards deepening the EMU.

The European Fiscal Board is now up and running. In September, the Council adopted the recommendation to establish National Productivity Boards and Member States now have 18 months to set them up. Today, Ministers endorsed a joint approach to simplify the application of the rules of the Stability and Growth Pact and make it more transparent. Proposals to complete the Banking Union and deepen our capital markets are in hand.

The Commission will present a White Paper on the future of the EU in spring that will consider more far reaching measures for EMU. Building on the Five Presidents' recommendations these include reinforcing convergence amongst countries, setting up a stabilisation function for the euro area; and reflexion on how intergovernmental governance arrangements could be incorporated into a European Union framework.

I am delighted ministers gave their go-ahead for new legislation that will ensure tax authorities in the EU can access data collected under current anti-money laundering rules.

This includes information such as customer due diligence records and information held in national beneficial ownership registries. Tax authorities will now be able to more easily identify the real owners of companies, and be able to react quickly to fight tax evasion and avoidance. The new measures should come into effect on 1 January 2018.

The Commission also supported the Presidency's efforts to reach a general approach on the second part of the package - the revision of the anti-money laundering directive, by the end of the year.

Finally, we presented our new VAT Digital Single Market package, which would simplify VAT for enterprises trading online. Our proposal would make e-books and digital publications eligible for the same reduced VAT rates as printed publications. We are looking forward to taking forward this work with the Maltese Presidency.

Thank you.

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