The European Union's 27 leaders agreed Thursday on a joint strategy for next week's Group of 20 (G20) summit on world financial reform, according to dpa. The show of unity achieved by Europe's heads of state and government at an extraordinary meeting in Brussels was designed to turn up the heat on the United States and other global players with important financial centres. News of the breakthrough was confirmed by Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borissov and other participants in the Brussels meeting. The European strategy focuses on capping bank managers' bonuses, tightening global financial supervision and coordinating efforts by governments to reduce the massive deficits that they have accumulated in attempts to mitigate the impact of the global recession. The informal talks in Brussels were intended to hammer out the EU's joint position for the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh, to which seven EU leaders have been invited. Much of the discussions in Brussels focussed on curbing excessive managers' bonuses - an issue especially dear to the leaders of Germany and France. "Enough is enough. I hope that tonight we can say that the bonus bubble has bust," said Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, current holder of the EU presidency, at the start of the talks. According to a joint statement drafted by the EU presidency, G20 members should crack down on the level of bonuses paid to top bank managers with "binding rules ... backed up by the threat of sanctions at the national level." Bonus payments "must be deferred over time and could be cancelled in the event of a negative development" at the bank, diplomats said. According to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, there should be "no going back to the bonus structures of the past." But Brown, who oversees Europe's most important financial centre, the City of London, warned that a failure to gain a truly global agreement would simply prompt the best managers to "move to other countries where the bonus structure is not properly in line with long-term success." The bonuses debate was part of broader EU discussions on how to boost international oversight of financial markets to prevent future financial crashes. "No financial location, no institution, no financial product should continue to exist unregulated. ... It is not in the interest of the Western democracies for something like this to repeat itself," German Chancellor Angela Merkel said, characterizing the EU's approach in the hours before the summit. EU leaders challenged the US and other G20 members to draw up joint plans to rein in public spending once the current economic emergency eases.
