Mr. Mario Nava:

I cannot make that judgment. I can say, however, that if that number of meetings did take place they were in relation to different areas. Today we are speaking about banking. The Deputy will be aware other areas such as corporate governance, markets and so on come within our remit. The areas we regulate are many and different.

It is important to make the point that all those contacts are transparent. It is probably not correct to claim that any particular outcome - the Deputy referred to minimum harmonisation - comes from those contacts. The counter-proof, which I think is relatively solid, is that the minimum harmonisation logic prevailed at global level. Clearly then a global level logic was in place at the time of the banking directives. The move from banking directives to banking regulation, which led to the move from minimum standards to maximum harmonisation, was made in 2011 in recognition of the need to preserve the Single Market, to have a single rule book and to avoid arbitrage. I would not definitely link them.