Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-11-05-Speech-3-179"
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"en.20031105.14.3-179"2
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"Mr President, I cannot tell you how excited I am to be here this evening to talk on behalf of the PPE-DE Group on this subject. I can see that it is a subject that brings great excitement to the rest of the parliamentarians and indeed the massive audience that we have here tonight. One actually wonders whether these late-night sessions put our European taxpayers’ money to good use.
I shall bend over backwards to do my bit and I will start by giving thanks to the rapporteur for all the work he has put into this. I welcome the fact that the new Financial Regulation gives us the power to scrutinise these agencies’ accounts and I also welcome the cooperative way in which they all worked with the European Parliament in this process.
Because of this autonomy from the normal management framework of the Commission, the choice of director, I believe, is a crucially important one. The appointment must be by open process and must involve the European Parliament. Indeed, Parliament should have the right to give its assent to such appointments and that is why the PPE-DE Group will vote to reject the Liberal amendment. Although it contains some interesting ideas about the structure of hearings in the Parliament, it only proposes to give the European Parliament consultative status. The PPE part of the PPE-DE Group is in favour of discharge for the agencies for numerous reasons, many of which I do not understand, considering in general terms that the state of the Commission’s accounts is just a pile of pants
I am using colloquialisms to give the interpreters a test at this time in the evening.
Although the bulk of the PPE Group is for discharge, there are, however, some concerns that we would like to lay on the table for the future.
We want to ensure that there will always be the highest management standards, in particular by these agencies cooperating fully with OLAF, by sharing best practice amongst themselves
because many of the management challenges are very similar
and by ensuring that their boards are an effective instrument to hold management to account and are not just a bureaucratic and cosmetic gesture. Some boards are already too big, especially that of the Agency for Safety and Health at Work, and enlargement risks making this worse. If boards become too big to assume their responsibilities in practice, agencies become vulnerable to become private fiefdoms
an example of which we have seen in Eurostat.
We would like to see people cooperating closely to avoid duplication
for example, the Agency for Safety and Health at Work and the Foundation for the Improvement of Working and Living Conditions. I think the Commission should look at this. The highest standards of financial management should be ensured in particular by strengthening internal audit capacities. We would like to see the European Court of Auditors conducting more checks.
I thank the rapporteur for all his work. The British Conservative delegation
the hopefully ever-growing DE
will not be voting to grant discharge, but the PPE will be doing so, and we thank you for all your work."@en1
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