Political groups

1986-1993: Socialist Group
1993-2004: Group of the Party of European Socialists

National parties

1986-1989: Partido Socialista Obrero Español
1989-1994: Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya
1994-1997: Partido Socialista Obrero Español
1997-2004: Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya

Biography

Joan Colom i Naval was born in Barcelona, Spain. He obtained a degree in Political, Economic and Commercial Sciences from the University of Barcelona in 1969 and received his doctorate in Economic and Business Sciences from the Autonomous University of Barcelona in 1976. He became a Professor of Applied Economics at the Faculty of Economics and Business Sciences of the University of Barcelona with a specialisation in tax federalism. 

In the 1982 general elections, he was deputy for the PSC-PSOE for the constituency of Barcelona, where he was first secretary of the Commission of Economy, Trade and Finance, and a member of the Budget Committee.

From January 1986 to February 2004, Colom i Naval was a Member of the European Parliament. He was active on the Committee on Budgets, the Committee on Budgetary Control, and the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs. He was also a member of the Delegation for relations with the People's Republic of China. Colom i Naval was Vice-President of the European Parliament from July 1999 to February 2004 and Vice-President of the Group of the Party of European Socialists from March 2000 to February 2004.

Signature of the Budget 2000. L-R: Commissioner Michaele Schreyer, Kyösti Virrankoski, Suvi-Anne Siimes, Jean-Louis Bourlanges, European Parliament's President Nicole Fontaine, Terence Wynn, Joan Colom i Naval © European Communities 1999

In 2004, Colom i Naval was appointed President of the Court of Auditors of Catalonia, an office he was re-elected to in 2007 and which he remained in until 2010. In addition to this, he chaired the European Organisation of Regional External Public Finance Audit Institutions (EURORAI) from 2004 to 2007. He has also been a member of the Executive Committee of the PSC and a member of the National Council of this party. In 2011, he resumed his position as Associate Professor of the University of Barcelona.

Colom i Naval has published on the topics of public finance, Spanish and European budgetary policy and the enlargement of the European Union.

For more information on his time as an MEP, click here.

Selected plenary speeches

At the plenary session on 24 October 2000, Joan Colom i Naval, speaking in his capacity as rapporteur for the Committee on Budget's report on the Interinstitutional Agreement on Financial Statements, outlined the background to the agreement and the need to improve scrutiny of the compatibility of legislative proposals with the financial programming:

On 26 March 2003, he spoke in the plenary debate on the report containing recommendations to the Council on the introduction of a financial framework in the draft Accession Treaty and voiced his strong disappointment at the Council's disregard of Parliament's competences:

On 1 September 2003, in the plenary debate on the effects of the summer heatwave, Colom i Naval appealed to the European Union's duty to take the lead and impose measures to fight climate change:

What's in the archives?

The fonds cover the period from 1986, when Joan Colom i Naval became a Member of the European Parliament during the 2nd parliamenary term, to February 2004, when he left Parliament, near the end of the 5th parliamentary term. His archives reflect a very narrow part of his activities in Parliament. It is structured around two major activities: his parliamentary work related to the impact and budgetary consequences of treaty reforms and his correspondence during the 2nd and 3rd parliamentary term, together forming two series.

In each series, documents are grouped in order of the involvement of Colom i Naval in the legislative procedures and in chronological order of parliamentary reports. Parliamentary and interinstitutional exchanges on the parliamentary report are kept at the end of each report. Finally, the topics of correspondence were quite varied, so it was decided to keep the chronological structure in order to improve the visibility of all documents.

Parliamentary work related to the impact and budgetary consequences of treaty reforms

The documents reflect the parliamentary activity of Joan Colom i Naval as Member of the Committee on Budgets (1986-2004). His responsibilities in this committee were manifold: It can be seen in many procedures preserved by the Archives of the European Parliament that he played an active role, both as a lead rapporteur or as rapporteur for opinion. Overall, the types of documents relate to the legislative procedures of the Committee on Budgets (reports, working documents, opinions, etc.). In addition to these legislative documents necessary for the work of the Member (and sometimes annotated by him), Joan Colom i Naval kept both internal documents of the Committee on Budgets and interinstitutional documents. The themes generally revolve around financial and budgetary issues. The documents follow a chronological logic corresponding to the establishment of the various institutional arrangements.

The documents are divided into four thematic sub-sections:
1. Towards a new phase of European integration: The reform of the Maastricht Treaty
2. Integration and future of the budgetary part of the European Coal and Steel Community Treaty
3. The financial perspectives for the period 1993-1999 (“Delors II package”)
4. The revision of the 2nd Interinstitutional Agreement and the financial perspectives for the period 2000-2006 (“Agenda 2000”)

The first sub-section contains documents of the meetings of the Conference of Presidents of the Committees on Budgets of the National Parliaments. The latter three sub-sections contain legislative procedures or legislative documents of other Members. These documents are kept in chronological order of legislative reports. The temporary committee documents “From the Single Act to Maastricht” have been classified in the third sub-section “The financial perspectives for the period 1993-1999” as this corresponds to the legislative procedure on the Delors II package.

Correspondence

In this section we find the archives related to the political activity of the Member. The document typology is mainly “General Correspondence”. The topics are quite varied (requests for invitations to official events, requests for information or requests for financial assistance, etc.). Documents have been sorted in chronological order and by parliamentary term:
1. Letters and correspondence - 2nd parliamentary term (1986-1989)
2. Letters and correspondence - 3rd parliamentary term (1989-1994)