Minister criticizes EU's financial perspective

  • 2005-04-27
  • From wire reports
TALLINN - Speaking at a EU foreign ministers meeting this week, Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet said the present draft of the union's financial perspective failed to take interests of all member states into account.

A ministry spokesperson said a lively discussion on matters related to the financial perspective for 2007-2013 took place at the meeting of the EU's General Affairs and External Relations Council in Luxembourg, which currently presides in the rotating presidency.

Luxembourg's foreign minister, Jean Asselborn, said the package of the financial perspective revised on the basis of the talks contained a number of proposals that, according to the presidency, should help settle the most important issues still remaining open in order to reach a political accord at the EU summit this summer.

Paet said the current EU presidency made a number of substantive changes to the draft, not all of which took into account proposals from other member states.

For instance, the revised package doesn't reflect the method for calculating limits for aid from EU structural funds. The option put forward by the commission is based on an average annual economic growth of 4.1 percent, which means that Estonia and other small EU members undergoing rapid growth would get less support from structural funds beginning in 2007.

"Each member state must have the right for support that is proportional to its real gross domestic product, and a fair methodology has to be found for calculating it. In Estonia's case one can realistically expect an economic growth rate of 6.75 percent," Paet said.