Berlin, Paris and Warsaw urge rapid EU banking supervision

(WARSAW) - European affairs ministers of France, German and Poland on Monday in Warsaw underscored what they termed the urgent need to create an EU-wide mechanism for banking supervision.

"Poland, France and Germany are determined to work swiftly to establish an effective single supervisory mechanism, involving the ECB, within the framework agreed at the June Summit," the ministers said in a joint-statement within the framework of Weimar Triangle, a consultative body comprising the three EU states created in 1991.

"We need banking supervision, the first step towards a banking union. We need monetary and financial solidarity, we need financial discipline," French European Affairs Minister Bernard Cazeneuve told reporters in Warsaw at a joint press conference with his Polish and German counterparts, Piotr Serafin and Michal Link.

Cazeneuveinsisted the mechanism must be created "as soon as possible."

France has become one of the leading proponents of an EU-wide banking supervisory body, but other members of the 27-member bloc are not convinced.

EU spending plans for 2014-2020 and the bloc's Eastern Partnership initiative also figured on Monday's Weimar Triangle agenda.

Ongoing negotiations on the budget in Brussels have become bogged-down in disputes between net-contributor states advocating massive spending cuts and poorer member states.

The ministers reiterated their commitment to reinforcing the EU's Eastern Partnership, a project spearheaded by Poland in 2009 to develop political and economic ties between the EU and six of its ex-Soviet eastern neighbours.

Focusing on elections in Georgia and Ukraine, the ministers stressed "the importance of free and fair elections, which are the key for further fruitful cooperation and gradual alignment with the EU."