Piia-Noora Kauppi, rapporteur. − Mr President, I would like to thank my colleagues for their kind words and also the Commissioner for his cooperation over the years.

I would like to make a couple of political points, firstly about the code of conduct for clearing and settlement. I do not think the time is right to make the final judgement on the delivery of the code. This has been one of the reasons why some of the market participants have been against the development of links and interoperability. They say that there are problems in settlement finality and also with the coordination of different rules. I think that when we now accept this directive it will make it easier for market participants to accept links and interoperability with their systems.

The second issue concerns the ECB. I think that we can cooperate more with the Commission, especially in creating a Community approach to different topics. We already have a practical development which leads to Community systems, and the ECB has been creating network-based systems which do not operate under any particular Member State law. It would be stupid not to take this everyday practical development on board when we are trying to update European laws. So I am very happy that the Commission will be taking a look at this issue. Perhaps the time will be right during the next parliamentary term to make these ECB-established systems part of the Settlement Finality Directive.

Finally, concerning the Hague Convention, we have seen how difficult it is to agree on details when this has to be done through European Community directives. It is very important to go forward with the Hague Convention and with the negotiations on different private law issues. It was particularly difficult to try to find a compromise on moments of entry and moments of revocation. These are very small items, but I think that the Commission is also moving ahead on those important topics, maybe during the next term.