Brussels fine-tuning quota plan as UK garners support to stop Reding

The United Kingdom has garnered enough support from EU member states to block a proposal by European justice commissioner Viviane Reding to impose a 40% female quota on publicly-listed company boards, according to a letter sent to the European Commission's president.

[DOWNLOAD LETTER as PDF]

Malta's justice minister Chris Said signed the strongly-worded letter, together with eight other countries that includes the Netherlands and six central and eastern European countries, to EC president José Manuel Barroso, and Reding.

While agreeing with the Commission's stance that there were "still too few women on the boards of publically listed companies", the countries said that targeted measures in this area should be devised and implemented at national level only.

"We do not support the adoption of legally binding provisions for women on company boards at the European level," the 10-country bloc told Barroso and Reding.

Instead they proposed that member states find their own national approaches to achieving greater gender equality. "Many of us are considering or have implemented various and differing national measures on a voluntary and, if appropriate, legal basis to facilitate raising the proportion of women in boardrooms.

"These efforts must be granted more time in order to establish whether they can achieve fair female participation in economic decision-making on Europe's company boards."

The Financial Times reports that the joint effort may force Brussels to drop the legislation, because the nine countries opposed to the proposal now have sufficient votes to block the plan under the EU's complex majority voting process.

Malta's efforts against the quotas plan enjoys the support of the Malta Chamber of Commerce, which wants measures that can encourage "a natural raise" in the number of women at the decision-making level in listed companies, instead of having the EU-mandated quota.

But the European Commission said on Monday that although it was not dropping the plan, it will be fine-tuning the draft legislation.

The European imposition of women's quotas enjoys backing in the European parliament which will have a strong say in deciding the issue.

"European laws on important topics like this are not made by nine men in dark suits behind closed doors, but rather in a democratic process with a democratically elected European parliament," Reding responded to the letter.

According to the European Commission's database of gender quotas, Malta's 19 largest quoted companies trading on the Malta Stock Exchange are all chaired by men, with the company boards having just three women, while the rest of the directors, 97, are men.

The proposed EU law will exclude publicly-listed companies that are SMEs, which have less than 250 employees or an annual turnover of €50 million.

But the quotas would affect companies like Bank of Valletta, in which government retains a 25% shareholding and the right to appoint the chairperson of the board of directors: BOV's nine-man board has no women, the last female director having been Marlene Mizzi, the former chairperson of defunct national shipping line Sea Malta. No woman has ever been appointed to chair the bank's board of directors.

In the case of state-owned companies trading on the stock exchange, gender quotas will come into force by 2018.