What José spoke about.

9

May

2023

PT Speech

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Revision of the Stability and Growth Pact (debate)

Mr President, this process will bring to an end useless and counterproductive rules that have harmed the economy as a whole and, in particular, the economy of several Member States of the Union. But the proposal we have here does not make what was one of the key points in the terms of reference of this review: investment protection. The European Commission wants countries to invest more in the gre…

19

Apr

2023

PT Speech

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Markets in Crypto-assets (MiCa) - Information accompanying transfers of funds and certain crypto-assets (recast) (debate)

Mr President, the cryptocurrency market today has a capitalisation similar to that of the subprime industry before the last financial crisis. And that dimension continues to grow, and it will grow even more after this regulation has been adopted and the public credibility given to an industry that is based on 'monopoly money'. But the fact that crypto-assets are joke money doesn't mean they don't …

15

Mar

2023

PT Speech

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Failure of the Silicon Valley Bank and the implications for financial stability in Europe (debate)

Madam President, 15 years after the great financial crisis, what the SVB crisis shows us is that the financial industry is the only one in the world that still cannot stand without public support and public guarantees. Even at a time of tight monetary policy, tight wage policy, tight fiscal policy, there are still no restrictions for banks. The problem is not that states do not do what it takes to…

14

Mar

2023

PT Speech

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European Semester for economic policy coordination 2023 - European Semester for economic policy coordination: Employment and social priorities for 2023 (debate)

Madam President, during the European response to the Covid-19 crisis there were those who hoped that the European institutions had learned from the disastrous response to the financial crisis. Unfortunately, it seems that this was an unfounded optimism. What we see in this Semester process is that we return to the same discourse and the same policies that marked, after a period of countercyclical …

15

Feb

2023

PT Speech

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European Central Bank - annual report 2022 (debate)

Madam President, the European Central Bank is currently conducting a monetary policy that is contradictory to its own analyses. It is the European Central Bank that has characterised the inflation that we are experiencing as essentially driven by energy, food and economic bottlenecks resulting from the recovery from the post-pandemic crisis. All factors are not very sensitive to traditional moneta…

13

Feb

2023

PT Speech

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REPowerEU chapters in recovery and resilience plans (debate)

Madam President, RePowerEU is just another example of a European proposal that says it will do one thing and, in reality, it will do another. It has served to divert funds from the Recovery and Resilience Fund to objectives opposed to those of the Recovery and Resilience Fund and, coupled with the bleaching of nuclear energy and natural gas, now sold as green energy, will serve to end the little e…

1

Feb

2023

PT Speech

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Need for urgent update of the EU list of high-risk third countries for anti-money laundering and terrorist financing purposes (debate)

Madam President, the list of high-risk third countries for money laundering has been a list marked by many criteria of what can be called sympathetically political diplomacy. However, there is a big elephant in the room that is the responsibility of the European Union and the Commission for what is going on inside the European Union. And what successive scandals have shown, Luanda Leaks, Pandora P…

16

Jan

2023

PT Speech

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Rules to prevent the misuse of shell entities for tax purposes (debate)

Mr President, ghost companies have for many years been one of the main tools for real companies to evade their tax obligations. The Pandora Papers scandal showed how these companies are systematically used, but it also showed how jurisdictions, including in Europe, favour creating the ideal regulatory framework so that these companies can be used to evade taxes. The Commission presented, because i…

14

Dec

2022

PT Speech

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Tackle the cost of living crisis: increase pay, tax profits, stop speculation (topical debate)

Madam President, after a response to the pandemic crisis, which seemed to indicate that Europe had learned the lesson of the financial crisis, we are heading back towards a self-imposed recession and economic crisis. The European Central Bank, against its own analyses, responds to inflation by raising interest rates. The Commission regrets the consequences of speculation on finance, distribution a…

13

Dec

2022

PT Speech

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A need for a dedicated budget to turn the Child Guarantee into reality - an urgency in times of energy and food crisis (debate)

Mr President, Commissioner, the Child Guarantee was created to respond to the shameful situation that we have in one of the richest territories in the world, Europe, millions of children living in poverty, without access to adequate food and basic public services. The program is important and well designed, but it doesn't have the resources it needs. It makes no sense, and cannot continue to happe…

12

Dec

2022

PT Speech

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Towards equal rights for persons with disabilities (debate)

Madam President, Commissioner, the truth is that, throughout Europe, the Member States that subscribe to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, that subscribe to the idea that people with disabilities must be guaranteed equal rights and independent living, basically adopt well-intentioned laws that they have no intention of complying with. Therefore, we continue to witness all …

22

Nov

2022

PT Speech

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Question Time (Commission) - Future legislative reform of the Economic Governance Framework in times of social and economic crisis

Commissioner, you spoke about the evolution of deficit and debt, which, as we know, depends on the evolution of expenditure, but also on revenue. I would therefore like to understand why the Commission chooses to use only net primary public expenditure as an operational variable. Because this option has a recessive bias. It was the option, for example, of the Troika programmes, which had disastrou…

22

Nov

2022

PT Speech

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Question Time (Commission) - Future legislative reform of the Economic Governance Framework in times of social and economic crisis

Commissioner, the Commission is agitating for the relaxation of certain rules which have proved clearly impractical and, therefore, the real balance of this new proposal is the streamlining and even the introduction of sanctions, particularly those linked to the recommendations under the European Semester. That is, these recommendations will no longer be just recommendations but impositions. Now, …

9

Nov

2022

PT Speech

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Digital finance: Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) - Digital Finance: Amending Directive regarding Digital Operational Resilience requirements (debate)

Mr President, DORA is an important initiative to strengthen the resilience of financial institutions to cyberattacks and it is an initiative that, although not as ambitious as we would like, namely in the reporting duties of financial institutions to regulators, goes in the right direction, in the sense of valuing public regulation of the financial sector to protect the financial sector itself and…

9

Nov

2022

PT Speech

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REPowerEU chapters in recovery and resilience plans (debate)

Mr President, the REPowerEU proposal has been presented as favouring the energy transition and energy independence of the European Union from other territories. In reality, apart from propaganda, what we have is a tiny proposal in its resources and its financing, which, incidentally, is guaranteed by issuing more permits to pollute, the first contradiction, and changing the already weak guarantee,…

18

Oct

2022

PT Speech

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Keep the bills down: social and economic consequences of the war in Ukraine and the introduction of a windfall tax (debate)

Mr President, one of the main economic and social consequences of the war was the return of the logic of austerity. And unfortunately, it is not only in the PPE that we see this return. In Portugal, wages and pensions will have one of the largest reductions in real terms in recent years and the largest decrease in the share of wages in national income in the history of our democracy. And this is t…

17

Oct

2022

PT Speech

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Guidelines for the employment policies of the Member States (debate)

Mr President, the report to be voted on the employment guidelines has some important agreements which improve the Commission's proposal in terms of working conditions, wages, public services and the fight against poverty. It also has other interesting formulations on the role of Parliament in this process and, in particular, on the assimilation of the European Parliament to the Council in all matt…

5

Jul

2022

PT Speech

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Mental health in the digital world of work (debate)

Mr President, the pandemic has shown that the digital world of work is far from being the paradise promised at some point. The reality of the dilution of working hours, the separation of work and family life, the reality of abuse, harassment and pressure on workers who are involved in digital working relationships shows the importance of achieving accountability, preventive and after incidents, of…

5

Jul

2022

PT Speech

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Common European action on care (debate)

Mr President, the report has important references to investment in public care services and the rights of formal and informal carers, with particular attention to the overwhelming majority who are women and, in many cases, migrants. The main limitation of this report is that it does not have consequences for economic governance rules and sufficiently strong consequences for the transformation of t…

4

Jul

2022

PT Speech

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Order of business

Madam President, my speech concerns Rule 39 of the Rules of Procedure and the strike by interpreters, whose extraordinarily reasonable demands were distributed to all Members at the entrance to the Chamber. These demands are intended to address the deterioration in working conditions, which is having increasingly serious and widespread consequences for the health of these Parliament workers, and a…

22

Jun

2022

PT Speech

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Implementation of the Recovery and Resilience Facility (debate)

Madam President, if there is a problem with the climate ambition of the Recovery and Resilience Fund, it is the lack of ambition and not the successes. Unfortunately, in the Regulation, the principle of crowding out fossil industry funding has not been endorsed and its consequences are already visible in the recovery and resilience plans of the various Member States. And it is curious that those w…

18

May

2022

PT Speech

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One-minute speeches on matters of political importance

Madam President, the execution by the State of Israel of Shireen Abu Akleh would, in any other context, be a worldwide scandal, not least because it was followed by more attacks after the journalist was killed. First, at his funeral for displaying the flag of his country, and then with a campaign of slander in the Israeli press. However, Shireen's autopsy also revealed the hypocrisy of the Europea…

18

May

2022

PT Speech

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Minimum level of taxation for multinational groups (debate)

Mr President, the problem of tax evasion by multinational companies has been getting worse for many decades and has benefited from the support of right-wing political groups and countries whose public finance models are based on the expropriation of tax revenue that belongs to other states by law. This opposition, moreover, was very clear, both in the negotiation of the OECD agreement and in the d…

4

May

2022

PT Speech

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Competition policy – annual report 2021 (debate)

Mr President, the European Union's major competition problem is today being felt in the pockets of all Europeans by the uncontrollable rise in energy prices. The European Union did not deal with the energy transition when it had the time and money to do so. It pressed the Member States, those that could be pressured, to privatise all public energy companies. It regulated the energy market in such …

7

Apr

2022

PT Speech

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Mental Health (debate)

Mr President, guaranteeing the right to mental health presupposes the regulation of business activity and the existence of public services to monitor working conditions and health, which have unfortunately been weakened all over Europe. But it also requires a return to a paradigm of protection of labour rights that prevents situations of precariousness, abuse, arbitrariness and violence in the wor…