Examination of Witness (Questions 176-179)
HON. JOE
BOSSANO MP
6 FEBRUARY 2008
Q176 Chairman: Joe Bossano, welcome.
You are familiar to many of us here and I suspect that, over the
years, you have appeared before various Committees in this place
on many different occasions.
As you know, we are currently conducting an
inquiry into the Overseas Territories. Although we are not visiting
Gibraltar this year, several members of our Committee visited
Gibraltar last year, and we therefore thought it was useful to
get evidence from Gibraltar as part of the inquiry.
May I begin by asking you how you assess the
Cordoba agreement and where we are today, given that you are on
the record as saying when it was agreed that it was in some respects
contrary to Gibraltar's interests and unreasonable. Is that the
view you still hold? How do you assess the progress that has been
made?
Joe Bossano: Perhaps one needs
to define what progress means. Progress means different things
to different people. The Spaniards have a very clear idea what
progress means from their perspective and therefore progress is
anything that advances the prospects of a Spanish Gibraltar. We
do not measure progress by the same yardstick.
One needs to distinguish between the tripartite
forum, which was created. We took the view then that we would
reserve our judgment and evaluate the results. The only result
that it has produced has been the Cordoba agreement. The Cordoba
agreement had a number of elements with which we disagreed and
which we would have altered if we had won the election, which
was a very close thing.
One of the elements was that, on a number of
occasions in the text, there was a specific reference saying that
the references in that document to the sovereignty of Gibraltar
was exclusively a matter for the United Kingdom and the Kingdom
of Spain and that this was understood and accepted by the Government
of Gibraltar. We made it very clear that, if there were a different
Government of Gibraltar, that different Government would inform
the other two parties—meaning us—that we would not
accept or understand that the reference was bilateral to the other
two signatories.
There is, of course, a very clear piece of progress
from the Spanish perspective: the Spanish pensioners got paid
revalued pensions from 1 April last year, and provided that they
accepted that that revaluation should be paid directly to them
in a Spanish bank account, instead of their coming to collect
it in Gibraltar, they got as an inducement an amount of money
equivalent to all the increases that they would have had since
1989 in the Gibraltar social security pensions, which no other
contributor has received.
Therefore, we have been very critical of that
arrangement, where people who paid the same number of stamps receive
different levels of benefit, because one gets retrospective payments
and the other one does not. Furthermore, whether they get it or
not depends on a number of things. One is that you have to be
Spanish: if you are another nationality, you do not get it. That
seems to us to be clearly contrary to the entire spirit of Community
law on non-discrimination. The second element is that you have
to have stopped contributing in 1969, when the frontier closed.
So we are rewarding the workers that abandoned Gibraltar in 1969
and penalising those who came to work afterwards. There are other
aspects, and therefore, rather than saying whether this is progress
or not, we say there are things we have no objections to and things
that we object to.
Q177 Chairman: Can I ask you about
some specific matters? What about telecommunications?
Joe Bossano: Telecommunications
is a clear win for Gibraltar in terms of its fundamental position,
as Spain had to accept the 350 international code, which had been
resisted until that time. For the benefit of analysing this element
of the Spanish restrictions, we need to realise that this was
not something introduced by the Franco regime; it was introduced
by democratic Spain, because at the time the telecommunications
were removed, the international dialling code did not exist. When
telecommunications were restored by the Felipe Gonzalez Government,
they refused to restore normality. Instead, they gave us 30,000
Spanish numbers, which were treated for calling purposes as though
they were in Spain. In fact, what has now happened is that calls
from Spain to Gibraltar are now more expensive, and we pay more
for our phone calls, but we have the benefit of being accepted
as a different jurisdiction and a different country with its own
country code and the calls are international, so we are happy
to pay more for them.
Q178 Chairman: What about the land
border crossing?
Joe Bossano: The movement across
the border has improved as a result of the actual implementation
of the red and green channel, which Spain promised to do when
the frontier opened in 1986, as part of the Brussels agreement
of 1984. When they signed up to the 1984 agreement, they agreed
that when the frontier was reopened, there would be a red and
green channel. It is progress that it has been implemented, but
it certainly is significant to recall that it has taken them over
20 years to deliver what they promised. At that rate, maybe we
can project future progress.
Q179 Chairman: You referred earlier
to the forum. There have been several ministerial meetings since
2004, and the most recent one was in November 2007. The former
Foreign Office Minister, Geoff Hoon, informed us last year that,
in the view of the Government, the arrangements were on track
and working well. What is your assessment of that?
Joe Bossano: I do know where the
track is leading to and, therefore, little comes out of these
things. For example, in the case of the actual arrangements in
the Cordoba declaration, nobody knew what was in it until after
it was agreed and made public. So in Gibraltar, we tend to rely
predominantly on leaks in the Spanish press. Although the three
parties are sworn to silence and confidentiality, the system leaks
at the Spanish end much more efficiently than at the Gibraltar
or UK end. Although reports in the Spanish press are not 100%
accurate, the deal on Spanish pensions, for example, was explained
in the Spanish media, with something of the order of 90% accuracy,
15 months before it happened. If anything new is in the pipeline
and we are on track to achieve it, we will know it after the event
and will then have to judge it post hoc. We cannot evaluate it
beforehand, because no information is available.
|
