Foreign

Home page

Foreign

EU president says more work needed on budget sanctions

16 September 2010 22:39 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. President of the European Council Herman Van Rompuy said on Thursday that more work is needed to decide sanctions for European Union (EU) member states which frequently violate budget rules of the bloc, APA reports quoting news.xinhuanet.com website.

More work is needed despite important progress made by the task force mandated to sort out ways to strengthen economic governance of the 27-nation bloc, Van Rompuy said at a press conference after a one-day informal meeting of EU leaders.

"We continue to work on financial and non-financial sanctions, taking into account some legal and constitutional elements," said Van Rompuy, who led the task force set up according to a decision made by EU leaders at the summit in March.

The president said that the sanctions will probably focus in the first phase on euro area and then on the whole EU.

"We will finish our work for the end of October," he said.

The EU leaders meanwhile underlined in a statement the need to maintain momentum on the reform of European economic governance, saying they look forward to receiving for its October 2010 meeting the final report of the task force.

Tackling flaws in the EU’s economic governance exposed by the Greek debt crisis, the task force, composed of EU finance ministers, identified four priorities at its first meeting in May, namely tougher budgetary discipline, narrowing divergences in competitiveness among member states, more coordination of economic policies and a permanent crisis resolution mechanism.

It has since met four times and is expected to present a final report to EU leaders on necessary reforms next month.