Agreement on the European Fund for Strategic Investments: extracts from the press conference by&nbsp;Roberto GUALTIERI (S&amp;D, IT), Chair of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON), Jos&eacute; Manuel FERNANDES (EPP, PT) and Udo BULLMANN (S&amp;D, DE), rapporteurs

Brussels

press conference

GUALTIERI, Roberto (S&D, IT)

BULLMANN, Udo (S&D, DE)

FERNANDES, José Manuel (EPP, PT)

European Fund for Strategic Investments (T)

Press conference on the agreement on the European Fund for Strategic Investments by Roberto GUALTIERI (S&D, IT), José Manuel FERNANDES (EPP, PT) and Udo BULLMANN (S&D, DE): extracts

External shot of the EP building in Brussels, 1 shot.

SOUNDBITE (English), Roberto GUALTIERI (S&amp;D, IT), Chairman, "It's with great joy, I would say, that we can announce that very early this morning, after a long political trilogue, we reached a political agreement on the Fund for Strategic investment. And I think it is a very good agreement."

SOUNDBITE (French), Jos&#233; Manuel FERNANDES (EPP, PT), Rapporteur, "We can now have a new innovative instrument and it's an addtional instrument - that will complement other existing instruments - to boost growth and employment."

SOUNDBITE (French), Jos&#233; Manuel FERNANDES (EPP, PT), Rapporteur, "On the objective of minimizing as much as possible the cuts on the Horizon 2020 and and Connecting Europe facilities, we have succeded to get 1 BN euros, which allows us to meet that goal."

SOUNDBITE (French), Jos&#233; Manuel FERNANDES (EPP, PT), Rapporteur, "We are going to continue with this objective of minimizing as much as possible, like I say, the impact on these two programmes (Horizon 2020 and Connecting Europe). That means that our work on the financing will go on with the same strength that we put into this dossier in order to achieve this objective."

SOUNDBITE (English), Udo BULLMANN (S&amp;D, DE), Rapporteur, "I think very succesfully we managed to have an appropriate governance structure, the leading personnel, the managing director will be co-approved by the European Parliament so we will not see any form underprofesional clientelistic people."

SOUNDBITE (English), Udo BULLMANN (S&amp;D, DE), Rapporteur, "I think this is a major step forward, we always said, well, the amount could be bigger, this is only the start, we worked also on the life time of this instrument. We could imagine in case of success to prolongue the exercise, so that we may create a permanent instrument of European Politics."

SOUNDBITE (English), Udo BULLMANN (S&amp;D, DE), Rapporteur, "We will not get into micromanagement of projects because that's not our job. We have the engineering tasks (we'll leave the engineering tasks to) with the profesional people".

SOUNDBITE (English), Roberto GUALTIERI (S&amp;D, IT), Chairman, "The basic guidelines are a new instrument that we as a Parliament introduced and the result of the trialogue is now that these investment guidelines that we already approved are in the annex, codecided. So this goes really beyond a simply indirect political role of control and scrutiny."

SOUNDBITE (English), Udo BULLMANN (S&amp;D, DE), Rapporteur, "I think we did a pretty good job in hindering politicization from coming into existence, in hindering micromanagement according to wrong allocation systems coming into existence and we rightly and succesfully installed objective criteria for better investment and for good governance in this specific European new instrument."

SOUNDBITE (English), Udo BULLMANN (S&amp;D, DE), Rapporteur, "For me politicization is, if a Prime Minister can call in, or if a regional minister can call in and tell the European body 'you have - because I'm the Prime Minister - to finance this or that project".