Today, the ECON Committee of the European Parliament voted the appointment of a member of the Single Resolution Board (José Manuel Campa), a member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank (Philip Lane), the Chair of the European Banking Authority (José Manuel Campa). After the positive vote in ECON now the EP plenary will endorse or object the election of the three candidates.
MEP Sven Giegold and MEP Ernest Urtasun, financial and economic policy spokespersons of the Greens/EFA group, commented:
“Our group was very active against the opaque system of appointments of the new top positions in the EU banking and financial bodies. We sent a clear message it is unacceptable to vote only male candidates in a sector where we currently have a very significant gender inequality. However, today we also want to go to the detail of the candidates themselves beyond the fact we disagree with the selection process and we would like to focus on Mr Campa’s appointment.
Mr Campa is currently and since 2017 Director of the Santander Polska Bank, Global Head of Regulatory Affairs and global Head of Investor Relations in Banco Santander. Therefore, his professional career is closely linked to one the too-big-to-fail European Banks, which will now could fall under his supervision, as a head of the authority that in charge of the regulatory framework of these banks. Campa is not only a banker, his job in Santander is ‘global head of regulatory affairs’, he is paid to lobby regulators. Moreover, Santander has a very bad track in the field of consumer protection, we have seen abuses in the field of mortgages, service fees and shareholders rights, with a long list of fines and rulings against their bad practices.
From a democratic point of view, this is unacceptable as the revolving doors between banks and their regulators are one of the biggest problems which explain the lack of control of the financial sector. Greens/EFA have been active denouncing a regulatory roll-back in the EU post-crisis regulation for the banking and financial sector, and appointments like the one of Mr Campa are at the core of this imbalance of power between the big finance and those defending the public interest. We will work now to gather a majority against this nomination in the plenary stage.”