Mr. Marco Buti:

Unfortunately there was no sanction and there was no way to enforce this recommendation. Basically, what we had at the time was that the Commission recommended Article 99.4 to conduct a more prudent fiscal policy. The Council would recommend and the Council did recommend and it stopped there. It stopped there because there was no element of sanction of any sort. The idea was that through peer pressure, peer conviction and exposing a number of risks, the national policy makers would take that into account but it stopped there. It was soft co-ordination and the enforcement tools, once the recommendation was not followed, actually did not exist.