EuroZone Debate Help

First of all I'd like to point out that these are not actually my views, and I have just been given a topic and been told which side I will be on during the debate.

The topic is asking 'How can the EU prevent similar High-Risk lending and borrowing practices?'.

The Statement I have been given is the following: Urge Member States to make employees within financial institutions more accountable for any investments they are involved in, whilst ensuring employees are able to report any misdoing by their employer without risk of punishment.

However it is my job to OPPOSE this and think of reasons why this is not an adequate solution, while the opposing team will be proposing this.

I can think of quite a few reasons to support this statement however I'm struggling to think of reasons to oppose it. Any help would be greatly appreciated

Well, you can start with the fact that the EU is the wrong group to deal with this issue, as it is, as it constantly does, stepping beyond its remit of arbitrating a common market and into the realms of political decision making for member states. This problem is compounded by the fact that fincancial institutions in the EU are concentrated mostly in the UK (for example, when the EU proposed a transaction tax, over 80% of effected transactions would have been in the City of London alone), so this would effectively be the EU singling out the UK and screwing with our economy.

It also puts EU member states at a relative disadvantage which would encourage banks to shift work away from the already collapsing EU economy. This sort of action needs to be taken by a concerted regulatory body which incorporates the major trade markets, given the level of international interdependency in the banks. The 2008 collapse started with a US bank which had bought dodgy US mortgage debts collapsing, but this knocked on to the rest of the world as all the banks owed each other money. An EU regulation would do nothing to prevent this.

Beyond that, there's the impossibility of enforcing legislation which makes a person responsible for a trade they made 12 years and 3 jobs ago, given that such a law would have to prove that the person who made that trade knowingly made a decision which would be in some way criminal (are we making being bad at your job a criminal offence now? Can you ever prove that someone deliberately made a bad trade?). As to protection for whistleblowers, people who report crimes to employers are already subject to such protection.