Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-05-03-Speech-3-191"
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"en.20000503.12.3-191"2
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".
Mr President, I would firstly like to thank Mrs Matikainen-Kallström for her report and all of you for the sensitivity you have shown with regard to such a serious problem as Moldova. I note that the sensitivity of the different political groups is in line with the sensitivity of the Commission when it made the proposal for supplementary macroeconomic assistance for Moldova and, in this respect, we are especially grateful for their support.
It is true that today, we are talking about macro-financial assistance, therefore, with clearly defined objectives, which will undoubtedly improve the financial room for manoeuvre so that we can tackle the other difficulties such as those which you have raised during tonight’s debate.
Of the amendments presented in the report, the Commission has no difficulty in accepting Amendments Nos 1 to 4 referring to the final objective of the aid, the need for a coherent approach in our various instruments for Community assistance and the need for social balance in that assistance. Therefore, the Commission will support these amendments in the Council and I hope they can be taken forward.
Nevertheless, I would suggest to the rapporteur and honourable Members that they reflect further on the remaining amendments. Amendments Nos 5, 6 and 8 advocate the establishment of a new committee to control this type of aid. In our opinion this initiative would be excessively bureaucratic and would not make sense. Macro-financial assistance is usually granted for periods of one year, it is not always renewed, it is granted in different areas, different countries, according to the circumstances and we believe, therefore, that the current system of concentrating its control in a particular body, the Economic and Financial Committee, makes sense since this is the group of people with the greatest experience and knowledge of the control and management of this type of aid. I would remind you that the Economic and Financial Committee is not a normal committee. It is a committee provided for in the Treaties which, in practice, consists of personal representatives of the Ministers for Economic and Financial Affairs. In our view these are the people who really have the ability to carry out this management. The creation of specific ad hoc committees would achieve less and would not be as effective as the current model.
I would also like to make another comment on Amendment No 9, which asks us – and I suspect that it also coincides with Mr Belder’s demand – whether we can provide information on the effectiveness of aid. We agree that the Commission should report on what we must do, but what causes us difficulty is the idea that this should be done before 15 September. By definition, macro-financial assistance includes a series of general economic indicators, which are not always available at that time. In some cases they will be available to us, in other cases they will not. We think it is much more reasonable that the Commission’s obligation should refer to the whole year and that we should be allowed greater room for manoeuvre between 15 September and 31 December to present these reports. We believe they will be of better quality if we have additional time available to us.
The Commission’s concern, as I see it, that it should be provided with figures for the budgetary debate should not cause any difficulty, since every six months, a report is sent to the budgetary authority on the guarantees covered by the general budget along with an annual report on the management of the Guarantee Fund. By means of both reports, the Commission will have access to all the necessary budgetary information. Nevertheless, in order to assess the aid we should be allowed more time.
Lastly, I would like to make a comment on Mr Seppänen’s concerns regarding the budgetary availability of resources for this type of aid. In our view, there is no difficulty. We believe that this type of aid can be dealt with by means of the current budgetary resources. It is true that, in the future, we will possibly have to debate whether the current priorities and our financial room for manoeuvre are coherent or not, but we do not think that this is a debate which can be held in relation to a specific report; rather it will require a much more profound and more general debate, which we will be happy to take part in at this Parliament’s convenience."@en1
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