EU can't afford another treaty crisis: employers

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - European companies do not want the European Union to be hamstrung by a new institutional crisis after Ireland rejected the EU's reform treaty, and they called for ratification by other countries to continue.

"We need to keep the ratification process going while governments find a solution," Ernest-Antoine Seilliere, president of BusinessEurope which represents more than 20 million companies, said in a statement on Friday.

"The business community cannot afford to be bogged down in another institutional crisis: the challenges companies and citizens currently face are simply too imperative to be set aside," the BusinessEurope statement said.

After France and the Netherlands rejected the EU's previous constitutional treaty in 2005, the EU went into a two-year "period of reflection" which many analysts saw as a time of institutional paralysis.

(Reporting by Jan Strupczewski; Editing by Caroline Drees)