Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-11-29-Speech-4-014"
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"en.20071129.3.4-014"2
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"Mr President, Members of the Court of Auditors, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, in 2006 the European budget was about EUR 106 billion. Admittedly, that is only 1% of the gross national product of the 27 Member States, but it is still a tidy sum. It is money coughed up by you and me and all taxpayers and so it has to be subjected to proper scrutiny. That is one of the European Parliament’s core responsibilities. Now for the thirteenth time in a row we see that the Court of Auditors refuses to guarantee the total legality and regularity of this expenditure.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is no minor occurrence. It is cause for some indignation. It is a serious warning to the Commission but also to the Member State governments that they need to do something. Karel Pinxten, the Belgian Member of the Court of Auditors, wrote about it in
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saying that if an internal or external auditor of a listed company with assets the size of the EU budget refused to sign off the accounts in this way it would send shockwaves through the financial markets. He is only too right, and we cannot just let this rest.
What are the sticking points? Agriculture, still the most important budget heading, at about EUR 50 billion. The improvement on that is unquestionable, thanks chiefly to operation of the Integrated Administration and Control System. But let us be clear on this, ladies and gentlemen, some Member States, notably Greece, are refusing to be part of the system. So this money is being managed by the Member State administrations and I think we should definitely show Greece the red card here. We should repeat our call for the payment of agricultural monies to Greece to be suspended until such time as Greece comes into line.
The second problem concerning agriculture is the payment – Mr Weber alluded to it and Mr Kallas picked up on it – of agriculture monies to golf clubs, railway companies, stud farms and landowners who are manifestly not real farmers and are pocketing money from the agriculture budget. And these are usually members of the aristocracy or royalty. There is a little game of ‘oh yes it is, oh no it isn’t’ going on here: Mr Weber says it is true, Mr Kallas says it is not. The European Parliament’s Committee on Budgetary Control held a hearing at which Mrs Fischer Boel, the Agriculture Commissioner, said that all this was an exaggeration and played down the whole thing. I would now like to hear Mr Kallas and Mr Weber giving us answers as to the truth of the matter. Can the Court of Auditors substantiate its claims? Does it stand by them?
The second large budget heading is still the Structural Funds. Twelve per cent of these monies ought not really to have been paid, according to the Court of Auditors’ report. That is not good enough. We have to do something about that. Hence our call to Member States, to the Member State governments, Mr President, because part of the responsibility is theirs. 80% of the European funds is managed by them. So I repeat here the insistence of Parliament, of the plenary, that they must sign a declaration to the effect that European monies have been properly spent, and so fulfil their political responsibilities. Denmark, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom have done so. Where are the other Member State governments? Where is Belgium, France, Germany? Should they not also discharge their political responsibilities?"@en1
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"De Tijd"1
"Echo de la Bourse"1
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