Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-01-16-Speech-2-043"
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"en.20010116.4.2-043"2
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". – Mr President, I would firstly like to acknowledge the work that the Court of Auditors did in producing the report that my report is based on which contained lots of detailed work. I would also like to thank the services of our committee which helped me a very great deal and indeed the ECB itself which kindly entertained me in Frankfurt for a day and told me where my report was going wrong.
There is a tiny bit of history behind this report. On 31 May 1998 the European Monetary Institute changed to the European Central Bank. The president was still the same person and 402 of the 407 staff that were working in the EMI changed also to the ECB. The ECB took on all the assets and liabilities of the EMI. The Court of Auditors' report identified a number of problem areas which I will come to shortly. The European Central Bank replied to the report, but its replies were certainly short, I would say ‘terse’, and the Court of Auditors found them quite inadequate since they did not give any indications of actions that the ECB intended to take to remedy the shortcomings exposed by the Court of Auditors' report.
There were two main areas where the Court of Auditors identified problems. There are equally two areas in which Parliament, and in particular the Committee on Budgetary Control, took a great interest. The Committee was obviously interested in the Bank's relationship with OLAF, and this is summarised in my report's Conclusion 4 which, if will allow me, I will read. This states: "Welcomes the public commitment of the European Central Bank, in its annual report for 1999, to establish a cooperative relationship with the European Anti-Fraud Office OLAF but regrets clear incompatibility between the public commitment assumed by the ECB in its 1999 annual report to establish close cooperation with OLAF and the decision by the ECB itself to prevent OLAF from carrying over internal investigations, pending the ruling by the European Court of Justice." That is a court case that is ongoing.
The other part that the Committee was very interested in was the contradictory procedure. It took ages in this particular case, and when I asked both institutions why, they both said that they had replied in the time that they were given and quite within the guidelines. So, I can only blame the postal services of Frankfurt and Luxembourg, and I guess they need greater liberalisation. However, I am sure these problems will not occur in future.
The main areas specified as problems in the Court of Auditors' report concerned the ECB's project management and monitoring. The Court of Auditors' report noted a lack of any commitments accounting system which had caused great concern; that it was difficult to track project development simply and coherently; and that the ECB had engaged a company of consultants to run some foreign currency reserve subledger projects in July 1998, but by the end of the year the ECB had still not designated a full-time manager for this project, although that was essential for the monitoring of the consultants' work. It also pointed to a number of IT problems.
The other point was extraordinary bonuses. I still find it extraordinary that the Bank whose primary objective is price stability saw its way to paying some staff the equivalent of a 38% bonus. The excuse is that they had worked a lot in the past – worked a lot of overtime – put a lot of work in – and that some of these staff were being paid only 9% over a period of years and this was almost like catch-up pay. But that is just shoddy management and really should not occur in a Bank like this.
As to my tactics, I was not really sure what I should do. As someone who is not a great fan of the European single currency and certainly not his country's entry into it, I had a dilemma with this report. Whilst I would like to demand that the ECB take note of what the Court of Auditors has said, I could have used this report to attack the ECB and got great headlines for myself back home, but that was not the role of the rapporteur. So I went to the ECB and asked for a meeting. They kindly took me to Frankfurt, and I was told that they had changed their bonus policy, that they had understood the problems in project management, and so my report is, if not actually nice, then enhanced by this meeting with the ECB.
At my meeting with the ECB, I was told that it had solved its problems especially relating to the bonus and this would not happen again and it would send a letter to the Committee detailing its current bonus policy. As it transpires, this letter has never turned up, and that is a great shame because the European Central Bank should not really fear criticism from this institution. We are simply doing our job. When problems occur, and they always will, it should not be the job of the ECB to paper over the cracks and pull down the shutters. It should deal with the problems and tell the EU and its public how it has dealt with them and not have a panic attack over how it communicates these things.
As my speech has suggested, the report could easily have been a lot stronger, and the ECB has got off fairly lightly this year. If similar or more problems occur next year, they might find such a report a bit tougher, unless they choose to actually open up, have a dialogue with our Committee, become more transparent and talk to all of us in this Parliament."@en1
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