Speeches

–Mr President, dear colleagues, while people are having difficulties to struggle also economically because of inflation, criminals are using our financial system in order to wash their dirty money. And the European Union, as we all know, has had a lot of scandals, has had a hands-off approach and it is high time that we cracked down on it. And AMLA will be a game changer in this. So this is why this package is extremely important in the creation, at the European level, of a European authority that is going to tackle precisely this economic nationalism that we have seen by Member States that make it very difficult, also for them, to really crack down on these practices. This is why this is so important. And I just want to again repeat my big thanks to this incredible team of rapporteurs. We have worked very well together. We have been extremely united. Again, thank you very much to Commissioner McGuinness, who has been absolutely key in order to forge this agreement between the Parliament and the Council and also, of course, presenting an excellent proposal on behalf of the Commission. Also a big, big, big thank you to the staff of the European Parliament of the Commission and also of the Council for supporting us throughout this process. To my assistants, Victoria, Gabriel, Clara and Andres. And also to Luis Garicano, who was absolutely key, who actually asked the Commission back then at the Commissioner hearings to make a proposal, a legislative one, for an anti-money-laundering agency. Thank you very much, Luis. Without you, this wouldn’t be possible. So thank you again also to the Spanish Presidency, the Belgian and the Swedish one. And what is extremely important is that the European Parliament, from now on, is going to have a clear say and going to take the decision, together with the Council, on the selection of any seat of any European agency.

Mr President, no one thought we were going to succeed, but here we are, at the last part-session of the legislature, to adopt the anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism legislative package. And, above all, to create AMLA, the new Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism Authority. It has been three years of difficult negotiations. First within Parliament, and then with the governments of the Member States. And it is not always easy to reach agreements in this Union composed of so many different sensitivities. The fight against money laundering and terrorist financing has been no different. Those of us who have worked on this package are aware of the monumental impact it will have on the integrity and stability of our single market, as well as on the security of European citizens, because let us not forget that dirty money comes from the most repugnant crimes, such as trafficking, drug or arms trafficking, or terrorism. It is estimated that each year around 1% of the European Union's gross domestic product comes from illicit sources and is laundered for entry into our financial system. The risk has skyrocketed with a war on our borders. For too long, the responsibility for preventing money laundering has rested exclusively with national governments. In the last decade, Europe has suffered serious scandals. I'm sure you'll hear the Panama papers. They will also remember the Danske Bank case, which managed EUR 200 billion – half of Denmark’s GDP – in suspicious transactions, relying on its subsidiary in Estonia. In this case, supervisors in both countries turned a blind eye for years. Money laundering can be very lucrative for a country, which has led to economic nationalism. These scandals have finally helped us understand that the only effective way to fight money laundering is with a purely European strategy, not a national one, led by a European authority. This strategy – as ambitious as it sounds – is precisely part of the new legislative package we adopted today. This package includes the creation of the new Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism Authority (AMLA). AMLA will directly supervise the 40 financial institutions in the European Union most likely to be used for money laundering and will supervise national supervisors to ensure that all apply European standards. It will also strengthen supervision of the often instrumentalised non-financial sector. In addition, AMLA will play a key role in the implementation of financial sanctions, such as those imposed in the thirteen packages approved against Putin and his collaborators. From now on, circumventing sanctions will not be so easy. AMLA shall be located in Frankfurt, Germany. Again: Herzlichen Glückwunsch. The selection of the seat has been a milestone for the European Parliament. For the first time, the seat of a European agency has been chosen jointly by the European Parliament and the Council by a joint vote. Thanks to the European Parliament, for the first time we established objective selection criteria linked to the activity of the future agency. I would like to thank once again the nine cities that submitted their candidacy for their commitment throughout this process, including at the public hearing in the European Parliament. It was pleasant to see ministers and mayors present the candidacies with so much effort. It is a pity that some countries did not defend their candidacy with the same commitment in the Council. I would like to thank my co-rapporteur, Emil Radev, who has been a formidable travel companion; my colleagues in the European Parliament’s negotiating team, Isabel Benjumea, Pedro Marques, Paul Tang, Ramona Strugariu, Ernest Urtasun, Rasmus Andresen, Gwendoline Delbos–Corfield and the others; Commissioner Mairead McGuinness, who has been instrumental in forging this agreement with her negotiating experience and institutional spirit. I would like to thank all the technical staff of Parliament, the Commission and the Council; to my assistants, Victoria and Gabriel; the Swedish and Belgian Presidencies, and in particular the Spanish Presidency and Ambassador Marcos Alonso; and, in particular, my predecessor, Luis Garicano, who called on the Commission to set up a European anti-money laundering authority. Without your drive and ambition, dear Luis, all this would not have been possible. We must be proud because, as of today, Europe will no longer be an easy destination to launder money or finance crime.

Mr President, in Spain we have a debt of 107 % of GDP and the new fiscal rules require us to reduce it by about EUR 14 billion a year, the equivalent of our annual defence budget. Either we reform our economy or there will be no choice but to cut spending. The government is throwing flowers because we are reducing the debt based on economic growth and inflation. But this is a mirage. It is bread for today and hunger for tomorrow, as many international organisations and the European Commission itself have already said. You will hear alarmist cries from the left, but these new rules are not a return to austerity, but an opportunity to make the reforms and investments that Spain needs. We have seen this with the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 crisis. In the end, we are always the same people who have problems, who need the help of our European partners. Now it's up to us to regain that trust. We must be responsible and use this opportunity to reform our country. Spain and the Spaniards deserve it.

Mr President, while in Spain more than 120 000 people were dying from COVID-19 piled up in the corridors of hospitals and alone, some took the opportunity to put public money in their pockets. While in Europe we were joining in a gigantic solidarity effort for European funds to help save lives, Ábalos, Armengol, Torres and who else saw an opportunity to enrich their party thugs. The Citizens' delegation was the first to report this to the European Public Prosecutor's Office, which has already launched an investigation. And we did it because we're embarrassed. We are ashamed of the incompetence and neglect with which some politicians in our country deal with the opportunities that Europe gives us. I feel distinguished, dear European friends. You identified support and solidarity with us during the toughest times, and this is what you get – corruption. I apologise to all of you on behalf of the Spanish Socialist Party, as I know they want.

Mr President, the Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform we are discussing today is a very good idea. STEP seeks to facilitate investment in industries that will be key to our future, such as artificial intelligence and green technologies. It also seeks to react to the obvious loss of competitiveness of our companies and to put an end to the dangerous dependencies that have been evident since the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. But, like so many other good ideas, STEP has come to nothing. It lacks the most important: money. While the United States, with its Inflation Reduction Act, injects some EUR 400 billion to support its industry, we in the European Union are responding with some EUR 1.5 billion to finance strategic projects. We're making a fool of ourselves. The solution is no less Europe, it is not a "save who can" in which the countries that can afford it irrigate their industries with national subsidies, but quite the opposite. We need to strengthen our internal market. We have to look for joint solutions to problems that affect us all. You can't be strategic at the national level. It is high time we had a budget for the European Union that would enable us to solve common problems and finance our priorities.

Madam President, Commissioner, one of our great challenges to the competitiveness of our industries is the shortage of skilled workers. And I'm not just talking about programmers or telecommunications engineers, I'm also talking about healthcare personnel, plumbers, lab technicians, electricians or welders. Already before the pandemic, more than 77% of European businesses had difficulty finding skilled workers. We have to reverse this situation. We must make the education system more flexible so that it can adapt quickly to the demands of market formation. It does not make sense that each new vocational training module has to go through a lengthy bureaucratic process until it receives approval from the Administration. If there is a demand for skills, which also have high employability, schools, and even companies themselves, must be free to provide training today, not tomorrow. If we want a competitive economy we need a dynamic vocational training system. Let us build a Europe of opportunities.

Mr President, Commissioner, Secretary of State, the problem facing young Europeans goes far beyond access to housing and low purchasing power. This is a real intergenerational crisis. Youth unemployment data are worrying and available jobs are often precarious, with low and temporary wages. This hinders emancipation and access to housing. For example, in Spain, 83% of young people between the ages of 18 and 30 still live at their parents' house. Faced with this situation, we hear in this House the voices of economic populism focused on dividing. But what our young people really need are courageous reforms. That same courage that left and right governments have lacked to reform the education system, the labor market and the pension system. Young Europeans deserve a real opportunity to develop their life project. Let's be brave.

Mr President, Commissioner Hahn, Mr President Murphy, the NextGenerationEU funds have been a milestone in Europe's history. For the first time, we have issued common debt to finance the modernization of our economies. Here, the work of the European Court of Auditors is key to monitoring and ensuring the proper use of funds. Spain is the largest recipient of NextGenerationEU funds across the EU, and more and more citizens are wondering where this money is. Some of us have already warned that the recovery funds were not being invested well and were not being heeded. Now, the European Court of Auditors warns us in its annual report: It turns out that the money we were going to use to build our future, in some cases, we are dedicating to plugging day-to-day holes. Programmes that were previously funded by current expenditure from the budget are now being funded by recovery funds. For Spain, what was to be a historic opportunity to improve the productivity of our industry through innovation is on its way to becoming a lost opportunity. Another one. It can't be. If we want NextGenerationEU funds to be successful and repeatable in the future, we need to use them well. Let's use them to transform our economies, let's invest in our future.

Mr President, Commissioner Hahn, the European Union now has two main challenges: ensuring the competitiveness of their industries and reducing their dependencies. For both, it needs more investment in strategic technologies. That is why today we are talking about the Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform, which is an important step. But let's not fool ourselves, it's not going to revolutionize Europe. It has neither the resources nor the infrastructure that our global competitors, such as the United States and China, which lately are operating as companies, do. In Europe, strength is going through our mouths. Thirteen billion euros. That is all that this Parliament is asking for. This is a quarter of Germany's R&D expenditure per year. And this is going to solve all our dependencies? We have to be serious. The European Union must have sufficient fiscal capacity to finance our common priorities and attract private investment. No country in the European Union will be able to create a European Silicon Valley on its own. No single European country will be able to end our energy and technological dependencies. Sovereignty is above all decision-making power. Let's decide then.

Madam President, if any of you have young children, you will know that one of the most pressing problems you face is the issue of housing. In Spain, for example, 83% of young people still reside with their parents and those who manage to emancipate themselves allocate up to 40% of their income to cover housing expenses. The question can be approached in two possible ways: some people in this House have proposed market control as the solution. I, on the other hand, invite you to consider a different perspective: Treat our young people like adults. What happened in my region, Catalonia, for example, when the government chose to regulate the price of rents? Instead of solving the problem, house prices increased and the number of contracts signed was reduced by 10%. We need a greater supply of housing, provide tax incentives to offer rent to young people and promote social housing. This is the only realistic solution. Otherwise, economic populism will deepen generational divisions and undermine the social contract with our youth.

Frau Vorsitzende, sehr geehrter Kommissar Hahn, estimado Secretario de Estado, just over 1% of the economic output of the whole European Union – this is the reality of the budget of the greatest democratic project that the world has seen in the past centuries. We are facing enormous challenges: climate change, geopolitical instability, demographic decline, labour shortages. The only way to face them is with a strong economy, and the key word here is competitiveness. Because while the other economic superpowers of this world are pumping in billions to support their industries, we find ourselves arguing about a couple billion, more or less, for a new strategic platform called STEP. We Europeans have to decide whether we want our industries to be competitive, and we have to decide if we run this race together with a strong budget for the European Union, investing in innovation, skills and leveraging private investment, or if you want to do it alone in a race to the bottom of national subsidies. The time to act is now.

Madam President, Commissioner Gentiloni and Mr Secretary of State, strategic autonomy, competitiveness, health and quality education: Let us not be fooled, in order to face these challenges we also need public spending. This raises an often uncomfortable question: Where is this money going to come from? The easy answer: more taxes on the rich. Of course it is important that taxes are progressive and pay more who has more. But to sell citizens that the answer to all problems is to raise taxes on the rich is not only populist, but counterproductive. Demonizing and insulting businessmen and big fortunes, as some on the left do, is only going to make them leave the European Union. This cannot be the target. What we need to do is make sure that both people and companies contribute their fair share. And this is only achieved with more tax harmonisation at European Union level. Regulatory fragmentation only creates more bureaucracy and tax engineering opportunities. It makes no sense for a European company to have to comply with 27 different laws and file 27 tax returns. It is crucial that we end the blockade in which we have been mired for almost twenty years. We must move with political will towards harmonization. The goal of any tax system has to be economic growth and not simply taking away some to give to others. Less populism, less demagogy and more economic growth policies.

Madam President, we would like to draw attention to the topical debate scheduled for this Wednesday entitled 'Surrogated management in the European Union: operational and marketing risk’. We have received complaints from many citizens about the biased title of this debate, which humiliates many children born by surrogacy. That is why we want to make it very clear that this is a debate and a title that has been chosen and defined by a particular parliamentary group, the ECR, without a sufficient number of parliamentary groups having opposed it. We want to insist that all children are children, regardless of how they were conceived, and that the thousands of European children who have been conceived by surrogacy cannot be humiliated in this way.

Mr President, Minister Roswall, Vice—President Šefčovič, dear colleagues, the reform of the EU fiscal rules is not really about reducing public debt, implementing structural reforms or spurring strategic investment. The reform of the fiscal rules is about building trust – trust between Dutch and Spaniards, between Germans and Italians, Polish and French, because trust is what constitutes the pillars of the Union. During the financial crisis, we finally understood that the EU economic governance framework was not up to the challenge. But after the reforms undergone during the 2010s, we still don’t have a set of fiscal rules that countries respect and follow. Now we have the opportunity to create a framework that builds solid and enduring trust between European partners, ensures the sustainability of our public finances and enables the European Union to properly respond to our future challenges. We can achieve these three things by increasing national ownership of the fiscal plans while also reinforcing national responsibility. It is the balance between flexibility and responsibility that builds trust. And to paraphrase Jean Monnet on today’s Europe Day, that trust will bring together both cooperation between Member States and the Union between its peoples.

Madam President, dear Commissioner, in Europe, we’re making a historic effort right now to achieve our energy autonomy as soon as possible and forever. Never again should a foreign country think that it has the European Union under its thumb. Both REPowerEU and now the Green Deal Industrial Plan should greatly boost strategic investments in energy. However, the most difficult job remains ahead: getting the funds into the real economy in an effective way. How? First, governments should take advantage of REPowerEU to introduce more effective measures in their recovery plans. They should follow the example of the US Inflation Reduction Act and replace complex calls for subsidies with simple tax reductions. Let’s also use the example of REPowerEU for the Green Deal Industrial Plan by turning state aid into an EU instrument. I propose that the new temporary framework for state aid should incentivise cross—border cooperation between our companies: more companies from different Member States involved, larger the state aid. But let’s face it, more money won’t solve our problems unless we learn to use it smartly.

Madam President, Commissioner Reynders, the image of Spain is tarnished by those who weaken the institutions. The Government of the Socialist Party and Podemos agreed to eliminate the crime of sedition precisely with those who committed it by organizing an unconstitutional independence referendum, declaring independence and approving disconnection laws. The Government argues that our Penal Code had to be adapted to that of other European countries. Lie: in the European Union there is no such harmonisation of criminal law, because criminal law responds to specific circumstances in each State. Spain needs the crime of sedition because nationalists threaten daily to break the coexistence between citizens. Or do you think that the rest of European countries would not defend themselves against a coup d'état? Please, let us not weaken the institutions that have cost us so much to build. Let us not leave our judges without the necessary tools to defend the rule of law.

Madam President, Prime Minister, thank you for coming, Vice-President Šefčovič, I would like to congratulate you, Mr Prime Minister, that anti-money laundering is also one of your priorities under your Presidency. It is definitely also a priority for this House, much more so after Qatargate and the realisation that this Parliament is not immune to corruption. The EU’s hands—off approach towards dirty money has only yielded scandals. The time has come to crack down on it. The EU must be bolder than ever if it wants to put an end to its complicity towards illicit finance. It needs a new anti-money—laundering authority to put an end to economic nationalism, to make sure Russian oligarchs pay for their complicity in the crimes that are being committed in Ukraine. This new authority will be a game—changer. An EU—wide supervisor able to utilise financial intelligence too. Thanks to it, the EU will no longer be a laundromat for tax evaders and other criminals. I look very much forward to working with you, with the Swedish Presidency, to make this vision a reality. Let’s get it done.

Madam President, Executive Vice-President Vestager, Minister Bek, the US Inflation Reduction Act is good news and bad news at the same time. It’s good news that the world’s largest economy joins the EU in investing in the green transition. It is bad news though that it does so by breaching the principles of the World Trade Organization and breaking the bonds of trust between two strong partners. Many now propose doing the same here in the European Union, but we need to stop reacting to what the US is doing and take the lead ourselves and do it our way. We need to develop a smart strategy which avoids fragmentation of the single market, and I would propose a legislative package based on three main aspects. First, we should make our economies more competitive by creating a favourable environment for business and innovation, and there are a lot of concrete things that we can do there. Second, we must invest in strategic sectors where the EU can still achieve a competitive advantage by fostering research and innovation. Third, we must defend free trade and diversify our trading partners. Colleagues, it is not about reacting to the Inflation Reduction Act. It’s time for our own strategy towards a European competitive advantage.

You mentioned the individual ownership of the Member States that you tried to focus more on in the proposal. I’m wondering, in this regard, do you think that this should also involve a greater role for national independent fiscal institutions?

The Commission communication indeed proposes to improve the sanctions regime, which I think makes sense. It improves the corrective arm of the fiscal framework, so basically the sticks. But I’m wondering, what are the carrots you’re proposing or having in mind to ensure greater compliance with the rules? Because conditional access to already—accessible funds like the structural funds doesn’t seem very compelling to me as carrots.

Mr President, tomorrow we are voting in this House on another historic milestone for the European Union: REPowerEU. With this text we adapt the recovery funds to the energy crisis. REPowerEU will not improve energy supply in Poland or storage in Spain; REPowerEU aims to ensure that no home or company ever lacks energy on European soil. However, receiving funds from the European Union entails responsibility. That is why, when we approved the recovery funds two years ago, this House called for reforms in return. We got countries like Spain to commit to major reforms that had been pending for decades, for example, making their pension system more sustainable or the labor market more efficient. European socialists now intend to overturn these reforms; delete a phrase from the Commission proposal explicitly prohibiting the use of the energy crisis as an excuse to modify the compromised reforms. If the Socialist text is adopted tomorrow, we will be jeopardising the credibility of our economies, and good luck if we want to repeat a recovery package like NextGenerationEU in the future. Ladies and gentlemen, we will do whatever it takes to overcome the energy crisis, but please do not create another crisis to pay for this one.