Improving the efficiency of the enforcement of judgments in the EU: attachment of bank accounts

Speech by Sharon Bowles MEP, Draftsman of the opinion of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs delivered to European Parliament on Wed 24th Oct 2007

I welcome the Green Paper and look forward to an early follow-up on more concrete proposals.

It is clearly in the interests of fostering cross-border trade for businesses to have the confidence to be able to recover debt. Citizens also need that confidence at an individual and private level. My opinion received unanimous support in the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs, not because we reached hard-fought compromises, but because there was a common view from the outset. I am pleased that almost everything that we adopted has fitted into, or been covered by, the final report by the Committee on Legal Affairs, for which I thank the rapporteur.

Two points that did not make it into the report were the possibility of applying attachment to joint accounts and the investigation of optional domestic use of the cross-border provision. In a less prescriptive form, there is an amendment concerning joint accounts that has gained support elsewhere. It is clearly a loophole if a nominal joint account enables evasion of attachment orders, but genuine third party funds must be protected.

Concerning the optional domestic use of the cross-border provision, I note what colleagues in the Committee on Legal Affairs said about the measure only being possible cross-border, be that for legal reasons or for practical reasons of achieving something in a reasonable timescale. However, unless alternative remedies exist in those Member States where attachment is not possible, or is extremely difficult, there could be a competitive mismatch, at least from the business aspect, with the rather unusual situation of a cross-border business being better off than a domestic one. Perhaps Member States will take note of this and competition will deliver what we do not or cannot legislate for.