Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-01-28-Speech-3-158"
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"en.20040128.12.3-158"2
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"Mr President, I was asked earlier on today by one of my colleagues for a rebuttal of the allegations of fraud in the European Union, and so I started off with a great surge of energy, mentioning that 80% of the EU’s budget is spent within the Member States, and most fraud occurs within the Structural Funds and agriculture. So I started off well, but then I suddenly had to slow up because I thought about the kinds of cases that have been in the papers recently – the Eurostat case obviously springs to mind. The problem there is that there
a scandal going on and it is difficult to rebut it. The Commission sat on the report, the General Audit Service did not open the box and look at the report and we have to ask why Mr Solbes did not keep a closer eye on his department.
I can rebut it by saying that the procedures for stopping this kind of thing were already in place, but the departments were overworked and there was no time for the system to work through. It was during the early days of the reform process. It is important, however, that we do not continue to allow the Directors-General to take all the responsibility. We have to see political responsibility by individual commissions. They have to shoulder this.
It may be worth people taking note of the outcome of the Hutton report today: we have seen the BBC found guilty of incompetence. It is interesting that it is not the Director-General of the BBC who has gone, but the Chairman of the BBC. It is the political head – not the administrative head. We should bear that in mind and think about what that means in this context. The accounting system has also, of course, come in for criticism and I could explain at this point that there are only two countries in the whole of the European Union that have implemented the kind of accrual accounting system that we want to see. This Parliament and the Court of Auditors, however, asked the Commission to get on with it. Of course, we must also look internally at the kinds of problems we have here in Parliament.
We are just about to enter an electoral campaign and many of us are enthusiastic about the whole European Union ideal, but we have to sell it in the face of a really difficult press, so you must help us to do more to counteract these allegations of fraud."@en1
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member; Delegation for relations with the Mashreq countries and the Gulf (2002-03-07--2004-07-19)3,3
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