Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-04-12-Speech-2-024"
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"en.20050412.6.2-024"2
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".
Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, I will confine my speech to the discharge of the European Parliament, as other colleagues will be dealing with the other reports. We should be able to say it here too: Parliament’s budget is in good shape. Enormous efforts are being made by our Administration under the leadership of Secretary-General Priestley to manage Parliament’s budget correctly, and they deserve our appreciation.
I should nevertheless like to mention two bottlenecks, namely the fact that we are operating from three locations and the voluntary pension fund. Our working from three locations, namely Brussels, Luxembourg and Strasbourg, is in fact required of us by the EU Treaty. That is already costing us, as taxpayers, more than EUR 200 million a year. Apart from the money aspect, there is also the time factor, which we can no longer justify to our electorate. During previous discharge procedures, we asked the Convention to delete this article in the Treaty from the Constitution, but without success. We, the new Parliament, should therefore make it quite clear that we disapprove of this situation and can no longer accept it.
I should also like to draw your attention to the paragraphs in the report on the European Parliament’s discharge relating to the voluntary pension fund. There is obviously ambiguity surrounding the responsibility of this House and the participants in this voluntary pension fund. As long as nearly ten years ago, Parliament made up a shortfall of EUR 9 million. Although it was decided then that a clear line should be drawn between this voluntary pension fund and the European Parliament’s official bodies, a twilight area continued to exist. This pension fund is going from bad to worse. There is already a shortage to the tune of EUR 42 million. We should therefore stress that the European budget, this Parliament’s budget, should not under any circumstances be used to plug this hole. It would be unethical and irresponsible. Taxpayers’ money may not be used to fill a deficit of EUR 42 million in a voluntary pension fund. I thank you for your attention and hope, above all, that we can, when we vote, ensure that these arrangements are in place."@en1
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