The EP plenary adopted some amendments on the economic governance six-pack. With these measures added to the original Commission proposal, the EP intends to get more transparency, stronger automatic warnings and sanctions as well as new fines are all part of Parliament's position, although left-of-centre groups argued that this represents too much austerity. Negotiations with the Council will continue with the aim of settling everything by July.

The adopted texts contain a range of improvements extracted by MEPs during the latest negotiation session concluded with the Hungarian presidency last week. They do not include Ecofin's proposals made on Monday, deemed insufficient by the MEPs involved in the negotiation. Among the new points are:

• Increased use of reversed qualified majority voting (RQMV) to make warnings and sanctions more automatic.
• More transparency by making public more texts and discussions than previously envisaged.
• Codification of the European semester into the legal texts, thereby giving legal weight to this procedure.
• Increased powers for the Commission through requiring more information to be supplied to it than previously envisaged and through surveillance missions to Member States.
• A new fine (0.2% GDP) for fraudulent statistics with regard to data on deficits and debt.
• An interest bearing deposit sanction (0.1% GDP) in the event of a Member State not acting upon recommendations to rectify a macroeconomic imbalance.
• Increased independence of statistical bodies.
• More detail on indicators to be used for checking for macroeconomic imbalances
• Safeguarding of social bargaining processes and wage setting agreements.
• Revision clause on Eurobonds (Eurosecurities). By the end of 2011 Commission to prepare a report and possibly legislative proposals.

The more controversial points which difficult the negotiations between the Council and MEPs are on automatically issuing declarations to Member States which disregard Commission warnings on expenditure overshoots. This automaticity is provided in the adopted texts since it is considered as the door to imposing sanctions and therefore can provide a real incentive to a country to rectify its situation; hearing of finance ministers by the EP and a reference to the need to look at high surplus current account countries (like Germany) as well as countries with deficit current accounts (high import countries) when evaluating the causes of a macroeonomic imbalance.

The adopted texts provide finance ministers and heads of state, ahead of the European Council of 23-24 June, with an official position of the EP as a whole. Both institutions wish to reach a final deal as soon as possible. MEPs could take that final vote in July, provided a deal has been hammered out with Council.