PURPOSE : to recast Council Regulation (EC) No 975/98 on denominations and technical specifications of euro coins intended for circulation.
PROPOSED ACT : Council Regulation (non-legislative act).
ROLE OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT : Council may adopt the act only if Parliament has given its consent to the act.
BACKGROUND : Council Regulation (EC) No 975/98 on denominations and technical specifications of euro coins intended for circulation has been substantially amended several times. The codification of the Regulation was initiated by the Commission, and a relevant proposal has been submitted to the legislative authority. The new Regulation was to have superseded the various acts incorporated in it.
In the course of the legislative procedure, in its opinion regarding the codification proposal, the European Central Bank (ECB) recommended that certain changes be introduced with regard to the technical specifications set out in the table contained in Article 1 of Regulation (EC) No 975/98 as well as in Annex I to the draft codified text.
Since the proposed redrafting for that Annex would imply certain substantive amendments, and would therefore go beyond straightforward codification, it was considered necessary to transform the codification of Regulation (EC) No 975/98 into a recast in order to incorporate the necessary amendments.
IMPACT ASSESSMENT : no impact assessment was carried out.
LEGAL BASIS : Article 128(2) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU).
CONTENT : in the interests of clarity, the Commission proposes to recast Regulation (EC) No 975/98. The amendment to be made to the table contained in Article 1 of Regulation (EC) No 975/98 takes account of the opinion of the ECB. It consists of a replacement of all existing values relating to the thickness of coins with new values. It is now considered appropriate that such indicative values be replaced by the real thickness values of euro coins, which are well known and used as reference value by the mints to produce the coins.
As a consequence of that change, recital 13 of Regulation (EC) No 975/98, which contains a statement regarding the indicative nature of the existing thickness values, should be deleted.