5. States that purposive transparency is a prime tool for managing risk for all stakeholders and makes available to market participants the information that they require as a basis for their decisions; stresses that progressive levels of transparency are needed: for the general public, openness about objectives is important, for investors, it is the detail of the nature, valuation and risk of investments and for supervisors, a full picture of positions, strategies, risk management, market abuse controls and other compliance procedures, subject to an appropriate level of confidentiality; suggests that negative effects of transparency, s ...[+++]uch as herding, as a result of which investment strategies are revealed to competitors, be avoided, and that positive effects, including preventing the assumption of worse-than-actual scenarios, promoted;

I would like to take the opportunity offered by your maiden speech to underline the fact that our first contact with these Commissioners has confirmed what you have said: we have ten first-rate Commissioners, and that is a really comforting fact.

The EU Information Policy for law enforcement aims to make the necessary information available to an EU criminal intelligence network to generate first-class EU criminal intelligence, resulting in the periodic production of EU strategic and operational assessments.

Additional added value will occur when data is methodically analysed in order to produce first-class criminal intelligence.

Let us not deceive ourselves: behind all the good reasons put forward by one side or the other, this issue will be a political test of the first order for the European Union as far as public opinion is concerned.

Ladies and gentlemen, the European Union is well placed to play a leading role in strengthening sustainable global development.