BUSINESS NEWS:-European parliament vetoes banking data share with United States

The European parliament defied intense pressure from Washington and ditched an extensive data-sharing programme enabling the United States to track millions of European personal financial transactions to counter terrorism.
An overwhelming majority of MEPs in Strasbourg voted to bin the Swift agreement, which has been operating on a provisional basis, enabling the US to comb millions of personal banking transfers and transactions to try to trace terrorist finance.
The MEPs voted down the EU-US pact by almost 2-1, by 378 to 196 votes, mainly on grounds of privacy and civil liberties, meaning that the Americans and the Europeans need to try to craft a different pact.
"This is a serious setback in the fight against terrorism," said a British government spokesman. "The agreement has supplied vital leads against those terrorists responsible for planning or committing attacks against EU citizens."
But senior MEPs argued that the interim deal with the US was inadequate and blamed politicians on both sides of the Atlantic for agreeing to a flawed arrangement.
"Our laws are being broken and under this agreement they would continue to be broken. Parliament should not be complicit in this," said Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, a Dutch liberal MEP. "The security of European citizens is not being compromised. Targeted transatlantic data-exchange will remain possible through other legal instruments. If the US administration would propose to the US Congress something equivalent to this – to transfer in bulk bank data of American citizens to a foreign power – we all know what the US Congress would say."
Washington had applied intense pressure on the parliament to agree to the pact, with Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, and Timothy Geithner, US Treasury chief, appealing to Jerzy Buzek, the president of the European parliament.
The parliament veto applies to data from Swift – the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications – which is based outside Brussels and coordinates millions of financial transfers and transactions every day on behalf of thousands of banks.
The transatlantic pact is part of Washington's terrorist finance tracking programme inaugurated after the 9/11 attacks. EU member state governments and the European Commission were keen to make the interim agreement permanent.
"The safety and security of our citizens will be put at risk by the European parliament's decision today," said an EU diplomat. " It's only by negotiating directly with the US that we've secured the stronger data safeguards that the parliament wanted. Now the US can walk away, ignore any concerns we have and stop providing the vital leads we need to help to prevent terrorist attacks."
Washington argues that the contentious arrangement has been "instrumental" in preventing terrorist attacks and said before yesterday's vote that a veto "would be a deeply regrettable and potentially tragic mistake".