Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-04-03-Speech-2-143"
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"en.20010403.7.2-143"2
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"Mr President, I should like to congratulate all the rapporteurs, especially Mr Blak for his hard work on this report. I can recall a time when this Committee on Budgetary Control was just a subcommittee of the Committee on Budgets. Mr Aigner, as chairman, fought to have it made a full committee and he also fought to get a Court of Auditors, which we succeeded in getting. Over the years we achieved real control and achieved the possibility to affect the management of the resources of the European Union.
But we are in danger of overplaying our hand. The more we shout about fraud and corruption, the less seriously we will be taken unless it is absolutely necessary and unless we know exactly what we are talking about. I want to warn against that because we in the Committee on Budgetary Control used to see ourselves as working with the Commission for the improvement of the management of our resources. Too many people see us now as working against the Commission, and I want to warn that is not a healthy trend.
I also want to refer to the question of the Statement of Assurance and discharge. The Court of Auditors was set up to apply accountancy procedures. It looks at the way money is spent. It looks at the figures and it comes to its conclusion that everything does not fit together and that it cannot give discharge. We have an entirely different responsibility. If you look through the lists which have been mentioned before – whether it be Italian milk quotas, whether it be olive oil in the Mediterranean, whether it be sheep in the United Kingdom and Ireland, whether it be the number of cattle in Corsica – you will find that in every single case it was the Member State that failed, not the European Commission. I am not saying the Commission is perfect, but we cannot oblige the Commission to say "you must crack the whip and every Member State in the European Union will respond", because it will not happen. Anyone who knows the short history of the European Union and the long history of Europe will know that proud states are not going to dance at the crack of a whip by the European Commission. But we can work towards it and we are getting there.
We will achieve a cohesive Union but we must be responsible in our attitude to the whole question of what is intentionally fraudulent and what are simply mistakes and errors that cannot, in the short term, be avoided."@en1
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