Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/1999-09-15-Speech-3-138"
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"en.19990915.10.3-138"2
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"Mr President, when I came in I was immediately confronted by three surprises. Firstly I saw you sitting there, instead of out here for our budget debate. The one great advantage of that is that because you are there and not here the Socialists now get more speaking time since you would have had speaking time in this debate. The second surprise is to see Commissioner Liikanen, after I praised him yesterday. I was about to welcome Mrs. Schreyer to her first debate and all of a sudden I see him there. The third surprise is the fact that there is no one here from the Council, because this debate is on SABs.
I say that with a lot of sadness because the Council deserves to be criticised over SAB1 and SAB3. I have said this at a trialogue meeting, we have said it in our committee and I now wish it to go on public record. The way the Council behaved over SAB 1 and 3 was nothing short of disgraceful. It was a slap in the face to this Parliament. For those who do not understand what I am talking about, I am referring to the timing of their submissions for both the supplementary and amending budgets, which meant that we would not have the chance to debate them in full. We will vote on them this week but it will be to all intents and purposes a formality. I hope it does not happen again. If I thought they were going to do the same thing next year, i.e. submit an SAB at the end of July, I would not hesitate to call a special meeting of the Budgets Committee within the 45-day timetable to make sure that we blocked it so that we could discuss it in full. It did nothing for the trust that we are trying to build up between the two institutions. It just led to antagonism and suspicion.
Having said all that, when it comes to SAB4 the speed with which the institutions have worked has been quite commendable. The Council took on board what we were asking and got it through within a week and tomorrow we will be voting on SAB4. This is indeed encouraging. We welcome the cooperation that has gone on in SAB4. We welcome the use of category 1 funds for external expenditure and we welcome that speed. However, two things need to be said about SAB4. One is that the 15 extra posts for OLAF are there, which we accept, but we need to stress that there has to be an SAB5. SAB5 should be imminent because of the Commission’s needs for payments but within the resolution that we will vote on we will insist on an SAB5 and an extra 15 posts for OLAF. This is a political decision which the committee and the Budget Control Committee have to make and the message that therefore needs to be taken to Mrs Schreyer, if not from you, Commissioner, then at least from the Commission services, is that we would want an early meeting with Mrs Schreyer to talk about the contents of an SAB5 to be placed before Parliament as soon as possible and, more importantly, to include the extra staff for OLAF."@en1
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