Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/1999-09-13-Speech-1-038"
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"en.19990913.5.1-038"2
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"Madam President, the second report of the Committee of Independent Experts, which has just been issued to us, is remarkable in terms of the breadth and the quality of the work achieved within a few months, and also in terms of the will to describe frankly the internal operational problems of the Commission. It is the first time I have read as incisive an analysis from an official source, without waffle or prevarication. It will provide a basis for working towards serious reforms.
The Council must stop letting itself be brainwashed by the peculiar arguments of the Federalists. It must re-establish its authority and strip the Commission of its outmoded privileges and immunities. Above all, it must not let itself be deprived of the future Intergovernmental Conference, which it must take advantage of in order to take the initiative again, reinforce the anti-fraud campaign and subject the Commission to a new form of responsibility with regard to national governments.
In the report, one discovers that the rules regarding the awarding of subsidies are practically non-existent; that the advisory committee on procurement and contracts common to the institutions has only a formal and subordinate checking role. That the Commission has turned to the technical assistance office in order to get around budgetary restrictions; that in shared operation expenses, the Commission and the Member States take responsibility away from each other; that a priori financial control is practically useless; that internal auditing is inadequate; that the Financial Regulation is unsuitable for the requirements of modern management and effective monitoring or that the enquiries of the anti-fraud unit have a tendency to drag on too long and offer only minimal results. These observations match what my group has long been denouncing, and also, indeed, the technical solutions suggested, i.e. reinforcement of internal auditing, of anti-fraud action, of transparency, and the requirement for the Commission to be accountable.
It seems to us, though, that the Committee of Independent Experts does not go far enough in the analysis of the political causes of the crisis, but perhaps, after all, this was not its role at this stage. For example, reading phrases such as this, on page 64, “Why has the Commission lost control over technical assistance? Because the Financial Regulation has never adequately spelt out the law on contracts”, one cannot help having the disturbing impression that thinking remains incomplete. Why indeed was the Financial Regulation unsuitable? Why was it not improved? Is it not true that a lot of people found advantages in these imperfections? And, in the final analysis, is it not true that the theory of the independence of the Commission, as cultivated by the Federalists, but resulting in the weakening of controls, has provided a breeding ground for irregularities and fraud which go unpunished?
Under cover of this, indeed, organised networks have been set in place to misappropriate and launder Community money, such that today fraud is essentially not the result of individual slips, like those denounced in the first report of the Experts, but rather of permanent covert mechanisms.
This is why, according to the Union for a Europe of Nations Group, the real political problem we face today is that of the statutes of the Commission, a supranational institution subject to limited control and protected by prerogative, privilege and immunity. In this regard we are witnesses to a disturbing development. Whilst, in recent times, the European Parliament has been attempting to strengthen its control of the Commission and the theory of its independence should logically have been retreating, it has instead re-emerged and been re-affirmed with new vigour, no longer at the level of the Commissioners but at the level of the departments. Thus, during the hearings of last week, Commissioner-designate Kinnock clearly upheld, both in his written answers and his spoken responses, two curious principles which I shall quote verbatim. Firstly, “management independence” which the Directorates-General enjoy with regard to the Commissioners and, as a corollary to this, the “principle of non-interference” which the Commissioners are subject to with regard to the departments. Mr Kinnock even specified that, in his experience over recent years, these principles worked very well.
Obviously, this is by no means the opinion of my group, nor is it the opinion of the Committee of Independent Experts who, in Chapter 7, rightly state that the distinction within the Commission between laying down policy and implementing policy is tenable, I quote, “neither in law nor in fact”. It makes it possible to evade political responsibility, and it should logically be eliminated in favour of accountability to the Commissioners who have political responsibility. There we see a complete contradiction between the recommendations of the Experts’ report and the declared intentions of the new Commission. We must draw our own conclusions from this when voting in the election of the Commission on Wednesday. Everyone must accept their own responsibilities.
As for the privileges and immunities of the Commission and its staff, they clearly seem, from reading the report, to constitute a serious brake on the fight against fraud. This is, in fact, the first obstacle which OLAF, the anti-fraud office, faces when it wishes to expedite a case against the staff of the European institutions in national courts of law. In fact, to quote the report, “to proceed with a criminal investigation, a national jurisdiction must request waivers of official immunity (for suspects), of professional secrecy (for witnesses) and of the inviolability of Commission premises (for searches and access to documents)”.
Such obstacles are enough to discourage the best will in the world. This is why the priority of my group is to get rid of them and to subject the Commission to common law before investigating other solutions such as the institution of a European Public Prosecutor, which would satisfy the Federalist hobby horses but would not contribute a great deal more in relation to the powers of OLAF in the fight against fraud.
More generally, control over the Commission should be strengthened. Control by the European Parliament of course; for example, our House should, following this Experts’ report, request new audits on specific points or even appoint one or more committees of enquiry in order to shed light on some still obscure areas, for example, the evaluation of the actual impact of community subsidies. But if it stands alone, European Parliament control over the Commission will be insufficient for two reasons: firstly, because the European Parliament shares the objectives of the Commission and because Parliament is not subject to the pressure of pubic opinion. That is why there must be Council control in addition to Parliament control."@en1
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