France must get better than the United States at economic intelligence rather than whining about US phone tapping, which is no reason to suspend EU trade talks with Washington, its trade minister told Reuters on Tuesday.
Reports that the US National Security Agency extensively intercepted its European allies' phone calls and emails including France and Germany have caused a diplomatic uproar.
Asked about the scandal, Trade Minister Nicole Bricq said the lesson was for Paris to improve its own economic intelligence gathering.
"Economic intelligence exists. There's no point in whining. I think we should be doing better, be better organized," Bricq told a Reuters Newsmaker briefing on Tuesday.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel demanded last week that the United States conclude a "no-spying" agreement with Berlin and Paris by the end of the year, saying alleged espionage against two of Washington's closest EU allies had to be stopped.
Bricq said she was not condoning spying on allied countries or their leaders, but gathering information on economic resources, activities and policies was "part of trade battles".
"We need to do better than the Germans, the British and the Americans," she said.
The minister, who has criticized the lack of transparency in the U.S.-EU trade talks and called for the publication of the EU's negotiating mandate to dispel public fears, said the phone-tapping furor was not a reason for breaking them off.
"I haven't heard one single EU member state say that we need to suspend the talks," she said. Even before the first round, "there were already revelations about NSA tapping. We should not feed all sorts of conspiracy theories," she said.
Read more of this report from Reuters.