Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-04-24-Speech-2-013"
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"en.20070424.4.2-013"2
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".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, my report is about the discharge of the Parliament budget, about which there are four points I should like to make.
First of all, I should like to share something that we have been articulating for years in different discharge resolutions, namely that Parliament’s discharge does not only involve the management of the Secretary-General or that of the administration, but also policy and the decisions made by administrative bodies in our House, such as decisions taken by the President, the Bureau and also the Conference of Presidents. Moreover, we do not grant discharge to Parliament’s Secretary-General, but to its President. In this sense, the paragraph according to which the President of Parliament should actually be available to the Committee on Budgetary Control during the discharge procedure to talk about the discharge in a public and formal debate, is, to my mind, of huge importance. In this respect, I prefer my wording to the amendment tabled by Mrs Grässle and the Group of the European People’s Party (Christian Democrats) and European Democrats. In fact, I think that Mrs Grässle’s amendment is at odds with what we approved last year with the Ferber report.
Secondly, buildings policy is important. A huge sum of money is at stake, and I would draw your attention to the dispute between Parliament and the Belgian Government in this respect. Years ago, the Belgian Government guaranteed, as did other governments in countries where Parliament has buildings at its disposal, that the land and the land development costs would be reimbursed to Parliament. There is now a dispute about this very point in Brussels, and the sum involved is around EUR 15 million. This is a huge amount of money. The Belgian Government has failed to deliver in this respect, and this is why I, in this resolution, would urge them to make amends, because this would be a shot in the arm for our negotiators, the President of Parliament and the Vice-President responsible for buildings policy. In the resolution, I have also drawn specific attention to the impact Parliament has on the neighbourhood in which we stay in Brussels. The residents experience a great deal of nuisance in terms of traffic, work and living conditions, and I think that consultation between Parliament and the local residents is of vital importance. I think we should be good neighbours, and consultation is important in that sense. I would like to see a report issued on this subject by next year’s budgetary discharge.
My third point – a very thorny issue – is the voluntary pension fund, which, at the moment, suffers an actuarial shortage of EUR 28.8 million. This is a huge amount of money. I have to say that the shortage is dropping, because last year, it was EUR 43.7 million. This voluntary pension fund, as it stands, contains the total sum of EUR 202 million, which has been invested in the stock market. We all know that the stock market can be a risky business and that results on the stock market are not always positive. A stock market can be fickle. There is every chance, therefore, that great losses will be incurred with this money. Hence the request for low-risk investments and for implementing what we already decided on in a huge number of resolutions, namely promoting ethical investments. In the 2005 Budget, Parliament boosted this voluntary pension fund by EUR 11.4 million. That too, is a large sum of money, and it strikes me as normal for the list of end beneficiaries to be made public.
We would ask for the list of end beneficiaries in the agricultural world, which makes huge inroads into the European budget, to be made public. Everyone is in favour of this. This is what will be done, as is evident from a website. So why do we stand on the brakes when our own MEPs are involved? Surely this has to stop?
From the nominal list, I noticed that the Group of the European People’s Party (Christian Democrats) and European Democrats submitted four amendments to have certain things deleted and I also noticed that the Socialist Group in the European Parliament applied for a number of split votes. That is their democratic right. I suspect that it is the intention to vote all these paragraphs out. Well, for the sake of transparency, I should like to announce at this stage that I have applied for nominal votes, because that way, the Members who vote against will have the opportunity to justify themselves before their electorates. I at any rate find it unacceptable that, at the end of the journey, Parliament will need to foot the entire bill. This is unacceptable and smacks of poor management of money and public funds.
Finally, I should like to draw your attention to a Kyoto-plus Plan. In the fight against climate change, the European Union and this House are unchallenged leaders. We have approved sound and important resolutions in this area. Well, what we ask of the citizen, the consumer, households, industry, the world of transport we should also impose on ourselves; accordingly, my resolution, my report contains a host of concrete proposals to reduce the environmental impact of our House, of our European Parliament in a much more ambitious manner than was hitherto the case.
I should like to finish off by saying that the two amendments tabled by Mr Fjellner and others enjoy my full support."@en1
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