EU lawmakers voted on Tuesday to remove what they said were loopholes from draft laws aimed at making EU states adhere to strict budgetary and shared economic targets.

A vast legislative rewrite was demanded by a key European Parliament economics committee on Tuesday evening, after nearly 2,000 amendments were tabled by MEPs who wanted to see stiffer sanctions on offending states.

After a four-hour vote, Dutch conservative Corien Wortmann-Kool said there was a “solid majority behind” the changes.

But Portuguese Socialist Elisa Ferreira complained of a “straitjacket” being imposed on states that did not allow leeway for “sustainability in compliance” with a widely-ignored but soon to be beefed-up eurozone Stability and Growth Pact.

French liberal Sylvie Goulard said the result was a “first step” towards meeting deficit and debt ceilings of three per cent and 60 per cent of Gross Domestic Product respectively.

She added that what the EU “needs is not only sanctions, but also incentives”, such as a serious move towards governments issuing common eurozone bonds.

The new cross-border European Union framework for economic governance is a core element of broader efforts to fix the causes of a year-long debt crisis that has seen Greece, Ireland and now Portugal apply for financial bailouts from partners.

The amended package now requires fresh negotiations with EU states, some of whom will still want to avoid financial penalties being too automatic in every case.

Parliament spokesman John Schranz said the changes would make that less likely. “The general idea is that sanctions are more automatically applied at an earlier stage and that voting rules are changed to apply to a wider range of sanctionable circumstances,” he said.

States would get “less room for manoeuvre” and scope for “political back-scratching” among national capitals to allow them to wriggle out of penalties, he added.

More use of a so-called reverse majority voting system would be made under the parliament’s changes.

This means a fine would be considered imposed unless turned down by a qualified majority, or voting that gives big and small states equal clout.

Changes sought by the parliament could also see the introduction of a new fine for false data reporting, not envisaged in proposals originally drawn from the work of a special task force run by EU president Herman Van Rompuy.

The parliament ideally wants states to be fined 0.5 per cent of GDP if found guilty of falsifying data, whereas the EU’s 27 national governments agreed that fines for repeatedly breaching debt and deficit targets would be of the order of 0.2 per cent of GDP.

Greece’s debt problems – a €300 billion mountain – increasingly looks like needing re-negotiation, say all the experts. The crisis first came to light after it emerged that Athens had misreported the size of annual deficits to Brussels budgetary watchdogs.