EMU: ROMANO PRODI URGES MEMBERS TO APPLY STRUCTURAL REFORMS.

The Commission President is asking the Member States to adopt key decisions for completing a fully-fledged internal energy and transport market. The idea primarily involves setting a date for opening electricity and gas markets for domestic customers (see separate article, Section IV), creating a Single European Sky and developing the EU railway sector.

The taxation package (including the savings taxation Directive) and the energy tax are the second priority picked by Mr Prodi. While acknowledging that a unanimous decision is required to adopt the proposals tabled to the Council, he stresses that an effort is needed to meet the latest end-of-year deadline.

Mr Prodi also wants to see all the measures in the Financial Services Action Plan, designed to foster an integrated European capital market by the end of 2005, adopted ahead of the European Parliament's June 2004 elections. This means the Directives on prospectuses for entrance to stock exchanges and on supplementary pension funds will have to be adopted, as will the new proposals on takeover bids.

In the case of the Community Patent, Mr Prodi is concerned about the lack of progress in this area, in spite of the European...