Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-05-16-Speech-2-054"
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"en.20000516.4.2-054"2
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"Mr President, I would like to join the many speakers who have congratulated Mr Bösch on his report. As usual – and as has already been mentioned – the annual report shows that in 1998 too, an excessive proportion of the European resources was not spent according to the rules. As usual, most irregularities pertain to expenditure in the Member States and vary in nature. The irregularities are partly caused by deliberate abuse of the regulations, partly due to errors in the implementation of European legislation or simply down to bad policy. I would like to distance myself somewhat from what Mr Mulder said on this score. The fact that so much fraud is being committed using agricultural funds is a sign that something is wrong with the way in which we organise our support for agriculture and this needs to change. The steps required to fight fraud have been mentioned on countless occasions, including today. I would like to highlight two.
Firstly, there are still Member States that have not signed the Convention on the Protection of the Financial Interests of the EU. My own country is one of them and I hereby call on the Dutch Parliament to ratify the act which ratifies the Convention and which has been with the Chamber since October.
In addition, it is also important that steps are being taken within the Intergovernmental Conference to appoint a European Public Prosecutor. To my amazement, I noticed that in one of the amendments to this report tabled by the PPE-DE Group, an attempt was made to limit the mandate of this public prosecutor, whilst I was under the impression that the PPE-DE was actually in favour of it. The PPE-DE Group would like to limit the European Public Prosecutor’s mandate to the European institutions only, while we have just seen that most fraud takes place within the Member States. The PPE-DE Group had better have a good explanation for this.
We have made a new start with the independent OLAF. In my opinion, it is rather important for the functioning of OLAF that its work be open to public scrutiny, and for there to be set rules governing investigations, which are available for perusal by Parliament too. This will prevent us from running behind the facts in future, as is now the case with the 1998 discharge procedure.
Mr President, my last point concerns the European Parliament itself. As you know, the Court recently decided in an initial ruling that OLAF only has limited access to the European Parliament. I regret that the Court has reached this decision and hope that it will arrive at a different decision in the final ruling. Meanwhile, however, I would like to make it clear that immunity for parliamentarians does not mean that we are above the law. If the Court’s final ruling stipulates that OLAF has no access to Parliament because the rules will not permit this, we must adapt our rules rather than overrule the decision, so as to grant OLAF access to Parliament, including parliamentarians, because, I repeat, we are not above the law."@en1
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