Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/1999-09-15-Speech-3-144"
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"en.19990915.10.3-144"2
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"Mr President, these supplementary and amending budgets relate to urgent problems, of that there can be no doubt. Both the reconstruction of Kosovo and the provision of humanitarian aid to north-west Turkey must be undertaken without delay in view of the disasters that have taken place in those regions, and it is the European Union’s moral duty to provide the financial means for doing so. Hence the resolution put forward by Mrs Dührkop Dührkop and Mr Fabra Vallés deserves all our support. Amending it will lead to unwelcome delay.
Nevertheless, we have a problem with certain aspects of the package. For example, we are not at all happy that the extra appropriations for Kosovo, Turkey and the Republic of Macedonia are to be financed in full by appropriations from category 1, agricultural expenditure. That is at odds with the spirit of the Financial Perspective. Additional appropriation requirements should, in the first instance, be met by making economies in programmes which come under the same budgetary heading, i.e. category 4 in this case. Initially, the Commission took this line as well, but came to abandon it under pressure from the Committee on Budgets, even though there is a great deal of scope for making economies within category 4. The MEDA programme, among others, comes to mind here. This programme’s low rate of utilisation gives cause for concern. At the beginning of September, only 24% of the payment appropriations for 1999 had been spent. Given this fact, it would surely be appropriate to reallocate this money.
It is clear from the current state of affairs as regards these payment appropriations in category 4 that a thorough and on-going discussion between the Commission, the Council and Parliament needs to get underway. How is it that practically all the payment appropriations for 1999 for programmes such as TACIS and the programmes for former Yugoslavia have been used up now, when this is by no means the case as far as MEDA is concerned? Can it be put down to poor administration on the part of the Commission? Or, and I suspect this to be the more likely scenario, does the budgetary authority fail to take adequate account of the actual appropriation requirements and absorption capacity of the various programmes when it adopts the budget? Bearing in mind that we are due to embark on the budgetary procedure for 2000, this must be resolved as soon as possible. One of the new Commission’s first challenges."@en1
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