30. Invites the Commission to report on the implementation in the Member States of Articles 70 and 71 of the Health Check provisions on risk insurance and mutual fund schemes; urges the Commission to come forward with a proposal for a European joint system to better address the risk and income instability of farmers related to natural and man-made disasters; stresses that it must be more ambitious than the present model in order to avoid a multiplicity of different insurance schemes in the EU, creating huge imbalances between farmers’ incomes;

My fellow Members will go into the various points that I have just described in more detail in their remarks, but I want to introduce one point into our deliberations that we do not talk about at all and which I believe is essential in the crisis, and that is that the major mutual funds that have taken possession of all levels of economic life and move hundreds of billions of dollars around the world every day – these mutual funds, the hedge funds, have taken control of the food sector.

Introducing multi-hazard insurance schemes or setting up a fund would seem feasible.

1. The competent authority shall, prior to the commencement of any operations involving the accumulation or deposit of extractive waste in a waste facility, require a financial guarantee (e.g. in the form of a financial deposit, including industry-sponsored mutual guarantee funds) or equivalent, in accordance with procedures to be decided by the Member States and approved by the Commission , so that:

The proposals that were made in the U.S., and which I think we should examine carefully, were intended to strengthen independent fund directors in the following four ways: to require fund boards to have a majority of independent directors; to require independent directors to nominate any new independent directors; to require that the outside counsel for directors be independent from management to ensure that directors get objective and accurate information; and, finally, to require that fund shareholders have more specific informat ...[+++]ion on which to judge the independence of their fund directors.

Mr. Hensel, as I heard you talk about the 12 million mutual fund holders across Canada and the impact in terms of the cost of the disclosure, am I reaching by suggesting that this bill, inadvertently perhaps, would be a tax on 12 million Canadians who have invested in good faith and are hoping to get benefit from those mutual funds before they retire, that this is actually a tax bill on individual Canadians who have invested in good faith in mutual funds?