Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-02-18-Speech-1-083"
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"en.20080218.21.1-083"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, the transparency initiative is probably the greatest success achieved by the Barroso Commission.
I am grateful to you, Commissioner, for your words and for the fact that you want harmonisation of the publication of information on beneficiaries of subsidies. This was a major point of discussion between Parliament and the Commission last year. As you know, this House and the PPE-DE Group have always stood by you on the issue of transparency because we want to know whether we are meeting our political objectives via the beneficiaries of the subsidies, in other words, the recipients of the funding. This is about meeting our political objectives, nothing else, and we need to know more than we do at present.
Commissioner, you are working on new ethical rules. We believe that the institutions need these rules and the Commissioners themselves need a new code of conduct. However, in order to avoid misunderstandings, may I remind you that it is not up to the Commission to lay down rules for Parliament. We make our rules ourselves. We are not public officials, unlike the members of other EU institutions, although imprecise use of language could create this impression.
We have an amendment to paragraph 22, and I would like to ask you very warmly for your support. We want to replace the list with a reference to the existing rules. Lists are all very well, but we want an open form of words which allows us to decide whether we want so many, or perhaps more – or, indeed, fewer – criteria.
We are not satisfied – and this is part of the report – with the difficult question of the recovery of funds which have been paid out incorrectly. Commissioner, I think this is going to be the major issue for us this year and the main point of conflict between Parliament and the Commission. This is an area which is anything but transparent. I would ask you to tackle this problem vigorously. Recoveries cannot continue in the same random fashion as in the past.
We welcome this week's action plan for the Structural Funds, but this needs to be underpinned with credibility, both for Parliament and for the discharge of the Commission.
Our rapporteur, Javier Pomés Ruiz, has drafted a good and interesting report, and I am sure that with this report as the opinion of Parliament, we will help the Commission to make further progress."@en1
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