Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-04-24-Speech-2-028"
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"en.20070424.4.2-028"2
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".
Mr President, our group, too, is prepared to grant the Commission discharge, effectively under the same conditions as those outlined a moment ago by Mr Jørgensen. Mr Mulder just stated that it is the twelfth time in a row that the Court of Auditors has failed to issue a positive Statement of Assurance, which is, indeed, a situation that has to stop. During the hearing in our committee, Commissioner Kallas, upon being appointed, said that a positive Statement of Assurance should be reached during his mandate; at least that was his goal. I know that the Commissioner is currently somewhat at loggerheads with the Court of Auditors; there will be a peer review of the methods they are using, and I still hope that this positive Statement of Assurance will be issued at some point, certainly during this mandate. It is true that a couple of problems seem to be here to stay, not least in the area of agriculture. In that sense, I am pleased with the Commissioner’s statement with regard to what he said about the integrated management and control system. We all know that Greece does not come up to the mark, not by a long shot, something that has been mentioned on two occasions in the Court of Auditors' annual report. There is now a concrete action plan; the Commissioner has made it quite plain that he is prepared to suspend payments if Greece fails to meet the conditions or carry out the action plan correctly. Two amendments have been tabled to that effect, one by the Group of the European People’s Party (Christian Democrats) and European Democrats and one by our own group. I therefore hope that at least one of those two amendments will make it to the finishing line and that it will considerably help the Commissioner when he gets to the point where he has to decide to suspend payments.
I have noticed the Council’s absence with regard to the national management declarations. It is outrageous that the Council should absent itself from a debate on the discharge, which we also need to grant to the Council, at a time when we know that 80% of all financial resources are managed by the Member States themselves, and this is something I deeply regret.
I also support Mr Mulder in his question to the Commission as to what measures it has taken to ensure that the Member States issue national management declarations. In our debate with the German State Secretary, it was concluded that shortcomings were attributable to our federal structure. I cannot imagine this to be the case. What I can imagine, though, is for a federal state such as Belgium to say ‘OK, three of our regions have declarations, two of which are not up to scratch, and one is’. Why could this not be done? In this light, I am really pressing for positive management declarations from the Member States as well."@en1
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