Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-12-02-Speech-4-022"

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"en.20041202.4.4-022"2
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"Mr President, the annual report of the Court of Auditors is a mainly competent and convincing analysis of the European Communities’ accounts. As all of us in this House can see, it is however in itself a scandal that this is now the tenth time that the Court of Auditors has not been able to deliver a Statement of Assurance. It should be noted that it is not, of course, the Court of Auditors’ job to try to discover fraud and other crimes. That is OLAF’s task and, moreover, there are plenty of such scandals throughout the range of EU activities. Members of the European Parliament and EU officials talk openly of scandals that have never been made public knowledge or given rise to legal action, despite the fact that many people are well aware of them. We find that the Court of Auditors cannot approve transactions concerning agricultural policy, structural policy, aid and pre-accession aid. These are far and away the dominant transactions in terms of sums of money, meaning that by far the largest portion of these payments cannot be monitored by citizens. This also means that the EU should not go in for paying out money to countries and organisations whose task it then is to spend the money according to the wishes of the EU authorities. It will probably never be possible to monitor such an arrangement. There really are no reasons for carrying on these activities that cannot be supervised in areas such as agriculture, structural policy and aid. There are reasons for helping poor EU countries, but such help should be given by means of non-earmarked transfers. Aid to non-EU countries should not be channelled via EU authorities but via UN bodies or else be given directly by the Member States."@en1

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