Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-12-12-Speech-2-280"
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"en.20001212.12.2-280"2
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"Mr President, it is always a pleasure following Mr Dell'Alba, because he makes a British Euro-sceptic sound very sensible in this place. I would very much like to congratulate the rapporteur – someone I like and admire as a person and politician – on this report, but unfortunately I cannot. Had it not been for the amendments concerning OLAF being adopted at the committee stage, I would have struggled to find any part of this report to support. Fortunately this idea found very little support at Nice last weekend. The Council – as pointed out so eloquently by Mrs Rühle earlier – does not like this idea either.
My personal view is that the European Public Prosecutor is just the first step along the road to
a body of common law across the continent. Indeed I believe that is what the Commissioner feels too. Perhaps, Commissioner, you would be so kind as to let me know whether that is the case – whether this is the first step to something that would be a common body of law across the continent. I thought I heard you say something similar to that in committee.
I should also like to know why the Commission's paper on this subject had its release delayed until the day after the Danish referendum on the euro. Perhaps the Commission knows that whilst this proposal has some support in the political classes of Europe, its support stretches no further than that.
Often in argument for a European Public Prosecutor, you hear that these proposals are only to protect the Community's financial interests – something that everybody should agree with. Interestingly though, they are often sold as being a small step – there is not much behind them. So why all the concern? Well, for those of us who are still wading through the Court of Auditors' report, we will find that one definition of fraud against the Community is the black market – paying for goods
as they say in Brussels. This is fraud against the Community because the EU takes a small percentage of all VAT transactions. So another question springs to mind: if the European Public Prosecutor is allowed to investigate every VAT transaction across Europe, how big will that office be?
There are so many other questions – the relationship with OLAF, who appoints the European public prosecutor, who they report to and how it affects the Member States – that I am afraid I am urging the British Conservatives and others to vote against this report."@en1
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"à la belge"1
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