Mario Monti

The new Commissioner for Competition under the Prodi presidency gave several indications of his intended policy during his appointment hearings before the European Parliament in August and September:

• “I could never accept renationalisation of competition policy”. But he supports the Van Miert initiative to delegate some of the work to national competition authorities, to enable the Commission to concentrate on the most sensitive cases.
• He is opposed to hiving competition enforcement off from the Commission to a separate autonomous body on the analogy of the German Bundeskartellamt.
• He does not believe that the EC competition rules hinder European industry from competing on the world market. On the contrary, “by ensuring the maintenance of competition on European markets, [they] promote European industry’s competitiveness worldwide”.
• He proposes to continue the Commission’s tough policy on state aids and is attracted by the idea of a public register of state aids to promote transparency.
• He is sceptical about public service requirements in the audiovisual sector, which should not be used as a pretext for allowing competitive distortion to occur. That scepticism applies also to the use of licence fees to finance state-owned broadcasters.
• He regards a competition examination of the regulated professions as a “priority”.