Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-01-18-Speech-2-285"
| Predicate | Value (sorted: default) |
|---|---|
| rdf:type | |
| dcterms:Date | |
| dcterms:Is Part Of | |
| dcterms:Language | |
| lpv:document identification number |
"en.20000118.9.2-285"2
|
| lpv:hasSubsequent | |
| lpv:speaker | |
| lpv:spokenAs | |
| lpv:translated text |
"Mr President, Mrs van der Laan recommends that we grant discharge for the 1997 financial year, and we interpret this as an act of good faith towards the new Commission, as previous speakers have already said. This discharge is to be granted pending a commitment from the Commission to undertake sweeping reforms; that is what it says in recital 1 of the motion for a resolution. Anyone, however, who believes that, regardless of the fact that discharge was refused for 1996, the discharge for 1997 will make everything rosy in the garden again, is very much mistaken! As far as I am concerned, the all-important question as to how willing the new Commission actually is to submit itself and its officials to supervision by Parliament and the judiciary, has gone unanswered.
Let me give you an example: one of the first issues we were confronted with, as the newly-constituted Committee on Budgetary Control, was the Fléchard case, which involved fraud in connection with the export of butter to the former Soviet Union at the beginning of the ’90s. On 7 January 1994, high-ranking officials in the Commission took the decision to largely waive the penalty which the company concerned was actually due to pay and which amounted to almost EUR 18 million. This was an outright violation of Community regulations in force and the first we knew of it was when an anonymous notice was sent at the end of 1998.
Everything I have heard Members of the Prodi Commission say on the subject hitherto boils down to a plea to stop poking around in things that happened long ago and to look to the future instead. The enormity of it all is that a Director-General and a number of Directors who were involved at the time have declared themselves innocent of the fact that, unfortunately, the minutes for the crucial meeting of 7 January 1994 have inexplicably disappeared. It is claimed that there was not just one copy of these minutes, but rather that there were several copies. It is said that whilst each participant received his or her own copy, sadly, none of these can now be found, none of them! Now, more than ever before, we can no longer say “forget it!” This is something that should be on OLAF’s list of cases relating to internal affairs requiring investigation but, as far as I am aware, it still does not feature there. This is also one of those cases that should be referred to the competent judicial authorities since, when all is said and done, allowing documents and minutes to disappear is no trivial offence but is expressly made a punishable offence in Article 241 of the Belgian Criminal Code. All I can say is that we will no doubt take up this theme again during the discharge procedure for 1998."@en1
|
Named graphs describing this resource:
The resource appears as object in 2 triples