Kay Swinburne, on behalf of the ECR Group. – Mr President, I would like to congratulate the rapporteurs Mr Tang and Mr Karas on their reports. Securitised products can be incredibly complicated financial products, yet in the past they had an overly simplified reputation and consequently enjoyed widespread use.

Post-financial crisis, the use of securitisation has severely diminished across Europe, however. I therefore commend the effort shown by this Parliament to encourage understanding and rebuild trust and confidence in these instruments. I am pleased that we have managed to bring this report closer to international standards and ensure that the EU is not placed at a competitive disadvantage globally. However, I personally believe that we could have been even more ambitious in this proposal and, indeed, with the Capital Markets Union project as a whole, as this is an area in which our level of achievement does not so far seem to match up to our rhetoric.

For CMU to work, it needs decisive action, not purely discussion and then compromise. We need an overhaul of national tax laws that favour debt over equity-financing, a reaffirmation of a commitment to global, supervisory cooperation and standards globally. Furthermore, a cultural shift here in Europe from savings to investment is critical.

The aims of CMU need to guide our hand in all ongoing legislation. We need consistency across all legislative files. The EMIR review, for example, needs to be very specifically about finding solutions to the unintended consequences and burdens that we have placed upon non-financial companies. Therefore, the classification of securitisation special purpose entities as financial counterparties, for example, as recently released in the Commission draft report, seems to contradict and threaten what we have achieved in the securitisation legislation. We need to be careful going forwards.