European Commission appoints new Deputy Director-General in its Budget department

Today, the European Commission appointed Silvano Presa as Deputy Director-General in its Budget department (DG BUDG), effective as of 16 October. Mr Presa, an Italian national, spent most of his career in that department, gathering experience in a wide range of subjects. One important task in his current position of Director is to prepare the Commission’s annual budgetary proposals and to participate in the budgetary negotiations with the European Parliament and the Council. This position allowed him to be involved in many key Commission policies. Mr Presa joined the Commission as an administrator in the Directorate-General for Economic and Financial affairs in 1985, where his work focussed on economic analysis of the internal market, trade, and cooperation with candidate countries. His vast experience makes Silvano Presa ideally suited to fill this newly created post where a key task will be to ensure the best possible interaction of the different budget programmes with financial instruments and Trust Funds, in view of enhancing their consistency, harmonisation and complementarity, while maximising their leverage. The new challenges the EU is facing, and the new strategies it is pursuing to meet them, call for such innovative tools and instruments.