Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-04-11-Speech-2-027"
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"en.20000411.3.2-027"2
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".
Mr President, the Treaty of Amsterdam greatly strengthened the system for protecting the European Union’s financial interests, by reformulating and extending the provisions of the Maastricht Treaty with the new Article 280. So Amsterdam provided two new elements in addition to the principle introduced in Maastricht in accordance with which Member States are obliged to adopt measures comparable to those they take to combat fraud harming their own financial interests. These two new elements mean that the European Parliament now has powers of codecision, and that the protection of the Community’s financial interests will have to be effective and equivalent. The entry into force of the Treaty of Amsterdam therefore means that the principle of the equality of all citizens and of the equivalence of all acts in the eyes of the law must be applied in the area of the protection of financial interests.
Mr President, we are now considering the first legislative measure on the prevention of fraud and other irregularities since the Treaty of Amsterdam came into force. This is an amendment to a regulation designed to prevent fraud and other irregularities relating to the common agricultural policy. In 1970, the CAP accounted for up to 87% of Community expenditure and this amount has gradually fallen over the last three decades to around 45% of Community expenditure today. It is therefore understandable that legislation for preventing and combating fraud should have developed independently for the CAP and not in relation to the general rules which apply to the whole budget. Until a few years ago, even the policing of fraud in agriculture was not overseen by the appropriate department, which was UCLAF, but by the Directorate-General for Agriculture itself. Now that the Treaty of Amsterdam is in force, this situation is no longer acceptable. We cannot allow the protection of the Community’s financial interests to continue to be undertaken on the basis of loose, unconnected and contradictory legislation which deals with the various attacks on the Community’s financial interests according to the specific amount at stake and not in accordance with principles of fairness.
As regards protecting our financial interests, we must put a stop to the rigid divisions between the various chapters of Community expenditure and ensure that no double standards are involved. Reform of the Commission cannot continue to be seen as a stream of meaningless clichés and as a hypothetical discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of various models of ex ante and ex post control and of decentralisation. Instead, it should be seen as the determination to put an end to feuding and to bureaucratic sectionalism.
This is why we propose that this House should request that the legal basis for regulating the prevention of fraud and other irregularities be changed from Article 37 to Article 280. In the same way that the Commission and all the European institutions have finally accepted and understood that all action in the fight against fraud must be undertaken in an effective and equivalent way, by entrusting OLAF with this task, the Commission must now accept that legislation on preventing fraud and other regularities must also be developed in an effective and equivalent way, in strict observance of the Treaty of Amsterdam. We are confident that the Commission will ultimately be able to agree fully with this principle."@en1
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