Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-10-23-Speech-1-134"
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"en.20061023.18.1-134"2
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".
Mr President, Commissioner, if we are to recover the amounts missing from the Community budget, what is needed is suitable determination, paperwork, transparency, stringency, proportionality and harmonisation of the rules and procedures. Sadly, we are a long way off achieving that.
The European institutions must not shut themselves away in a world of rules and regulations, far removed from reality. For this reason, this report on the recovery of Community funds takes as its starting point a specific example: never before have we had a bigger sum to recover – it is put at almost EUR 100 million – and the circumstances surrounding the missing money are worse still.
This concerns a crime perpetrated by a criminal organisation that has enjoyed the collusion of any number of European companies, and, following the investigation and cooperation on the part of the Italian authorities, the European bodies were notified of the details of the case. The
held an investigation into the illegal import of butter by firms controlled by the Naples Camorra, the adulteration of that butter with unrendered beef fat, vegetable oils and a chemical known as lipostrol, the sale of tens of thousands of tonnes of the finished product to various European companies and lastly the use of this product for the fraudulent use of export refunds and disposal subsidies for pastry goods. The findings of this investigation were then passed on to the relevant Community and national authorities.
Seven years after the Italian investigation, and what has happened? In one of the Member States concerned, the authorities only decided to launch an inquiry four years after the original Italian report came out, and none of the estimated missing EUR 40 million has been recovered. In another Member State, the inquiry has not even got off the ground, so none of the EUR 50 million-plus has been recovered. In a third Member State, the problem was deemed merely administrative and the original fines have been cut and the amounts involved almost nominal.
Outside Italy, where, on the basis of a national initiative, dozens of people were arrested for murder, illegal possession of weapons and association to commit offences, and where complex legal processes are ongoing, there is no realistic expectation of securing any convictions in the countries concerned or of the Community money being recovered. Everything indicates that the whole process will lapse.
Owing to legal confidentiality, most of the national authorities responsible for food safety have not, as yet, been notified of this fraud. While the Community and national authorities act with such a lack of determination and coordination in addressing a crime of this magnitude, countless cases have come to light, in which, under discretionary powers granted in the cause of recovering Community funds, the authorities have hounded honest farmers to return money, without any substantive justification and for procedural reasons that are not always genuine, and this has often left the farmers in a state of poverty. For these farmers the principles of the presumption of innocence, the right to be informed of the nature of an accusation, proportionality and the guarantee of adequate resources to mount a defence are not worth the paper they are written on. The crux of the matter is that Article 280 of the Treaty is being ignored. The notion of cooperation between the Commission and the Member States for protecting the Community’s financial interests is pie in the sky. The effective and equivalent protection of these interests for the citizens is not being delivered.
Against this backdrop, root and branch changes must be carried out, be it by redefining the functions of Eurojust, by establishing a European Public Prosecutor or by some other means. We need a European initiative that ensures that cooperation on justice, with a view to protecting the Community's financial interests, is backed up by action, and is not mere rhetoric, as has happened in this case, the biggest of its kind in the area of Community finance."@en1
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"Guardia de finanzia"1
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