Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/1999-09-16-Speech-4-013"
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"en.19990916.2.4-013"2
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"Mr President, we welcome with great interest and some concern the draft which has been submitted to us, and of course we approve of the general positions stated by our rapporteur, Mrs Pack.
On the matter of the Committee on Budgets and Mr Tillich – whom I am representing here on an ad hoc basis – and I hope, Commissioner, that you will forgive me if I am not able to stay in order to hear your replies, but I shall certainly look forward to finding out about them – our concerns are both positive and worrying.
There are three things whose presence we welcome. Firstly, we welcome the idea that this agency will be active at a grass roots level. It is at a grass roots level that problems will be solved, not in Brussels. It is better to do things in Pristina than to wait in vain for them to be done in Brussels.
Secondly, we also welcome the maintenance, within the structure of the agency, of a system of hierarchical responsibility, which means that this agency will be headed by management staff from the Commission. Nevertheless, we do feel that the distribution of tasks is unsatisfactory and gives the staff sent by the Commission a too basic and limited role compared to workers recruited on-site.
We are also delighted with the administrative flexibility which I have just mentioned, which means that we will be able to attend to local needs with largely locally recruited staff who, consequently, know the area well. I shall describe this agency, Commissioner, as a kind of anti-TAO, as we have combined the flexibility necessary in TAOs with keeping hierarchy and responsibility, the lack of which has sometimes been criticised.
We have five main concerns. Firstly, the location. There is no point in leaving Brussels only to move to Thessaloniki. Either you are on-site or you are not. This agency will be dealing with problems in Kosovo, so it should be in Kosovo. Secondly, its length of stay. We support the idea of an agency which acts when needs arise. We oppose the idea of an agency whose administration would continue indefinitely. From this point of view, a length of stay of 30 months seems, at least to start with, quite satisfactory.
Our fundamental concerns relate to the balance of power between the Commission, the Council and the Member States. This is of real concern to us. In the structure which has been proposed, we – and the Court of Auditors shares our concern – see a serious risk of the Commission’s administrative authority being dismembered in favour of an intergovernmental supervision which we cannot approve of. We are also in favour of a board of management which will not hand over the management of the agency to the Member States, but which will uphold the Commission’s control. We are defending you, Commissioner, and we are asking you to defend yourself too. We also favour not a management committee, but a consultative committee, in which the Member States will play a role, can make their voices heard, but in which they are not the real decision-makers.
Our last concern is for clear financial responsibility. It is essential that what is paid for by the European Union should be managed by the European Union, and that what is paid for by Member States should be managed by the Member States."@en1
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