Mr. Carlos Martínez Mongay:

I will try. First, the treaties are totally neutral with respect to the ownership of the companies. Nobody in the Commission, on the basis of the treaties, is suggesting that public ownership is bad. This is not stated anywhere in the treaties. On the contrary, the treaties say that wherever the ownership is, if the company is operating in a market, it should follow the market rules. The Commission is completely neutral with respect to the ownership. It will not accept a public company receiving public money when a private investor would not put a single euro in it while the company operates in an open market because this public company would have a selective advantage with respect to the other companies operating in the market. This is the basic rule.

There is no preference for any kind of ownership, but if public and private enterprises operate in the same market they have to operate on the same level playing field. What happened with the banks, not only in this country but in other countries, was that we had a private company that went bankrupt. A private company, such as a news agency, should go to the market. In the case of the banks, since they carry systemic risk it was accepted that public money would be put into companies which were already bankrupt. We kept rolling, thanks to public money, companies that should have disappeared from the market. Public money is the taxpayers' money. In some cases, and I do not mean all of the decisions made concerning banks, the Commission accepted putting in this public money, with the single goal of ensuring the company would go back to the markets in an independent way without the need for more support. In some cases, and I do not want to enter into the specifics of each case, the positive decision by the Commission to allow the Government to put money into a given bank was made with the condition that the money should be recovered. Who should pay this money back? It is the bank and nobody else. In my view, and perhaps this is more personal, the taxpayers have the right to get back the money they put into the banks. This is why in some cases when the public money has done its work, which is to put the company back on its feet, and the company has recovered value, then this value should go back to the taxpayer. These are the principles the Commission consistently applies to every member state.