EU member country heads of government across the political spectrum have also warned that regulation is crippling the bloc’s economy, and many have put pressure on the Commission to go further.
France’s centrist government, for one, wants the EU to indefinitely delay its due diligence law, while also echoing Germany’s socialist Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s request to delay the implementation phase of the corporate sustainability reporting obligations by two years.
For CISL’s Kuzmanova, the focus on delays “is very telling” and indicates that “this is not about competitiveness and providing support to European businesses … delaying is not simplifying. It is not making anyone’s life easier.”
Deregulation fears
It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that the European Commission referred to the omnibus as the first of several simplification packages targeting environmental legislation in the EU, fuelling fears that the simplification agenda will lead to a broader unravelling of environmental rules.
The first clue is that the European People’s Party — von der Leyen’s own political family, which had asked for a simplification package during her campaign — want the laws to apply only to “the largest companies with more than 1,000 employees.” The group is also calling for a two-year delay of the EU’s carbon tariffs on imported products, the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism.
Another concern is that the simplification package targets rules that have not even been fully implemented. The CSRD, for example, which passed in 2023, only began to apply to a limited number of Europe’s largest companies last year, with the first reporting deadline arriving this month. Other companies are to be brought under the regime in stages: Large listed companies have until 2025; small and mid-sized companies until 2026: while non-EU companies will report in 2028.
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