Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-01-16-Speech-2-012"
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"en.20010116.2.2-012"2
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".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, allow me to carry on straightaway from where Mrs Theato left off. Commissioner, we are actually finding it quite hard to imagine what the point would be of having an advisory office for financial irregularities of the kind you envisage. The same applies to the new agency for internal administrative investigations that the Commission is planning to set up. What purpose would this office and agency actually serve, when by the Commission’s own decree, OLAF is responsible for all serious breaches of duty against the interests of the Community, and not just for fraud-related offences? I would remind you once again that you, yourself, decided that that is how it should be, yet you are evidently on the point of allowing some kind of pointless superstructure to form part of your proposals.
Mrs van der Laan’s report quite rightly maintains that the Commission has not yet made sufficient progress on the personnel policy front for Parliament’s taste. This particularly applies to the already long overdue reform of the disciplinary procedure. Of course, this has a great deal to do with the budgetary discharge, because one thing that also concerns us is the issue of the liability of officials in respect of damage they cause. Do Commission officials have to defray the costs of damage they cause, themselves, at least as far as their financial means permit? In principle, the answer to this question has long been ‘yes’. Only, the corresponding provisions of Articles 73 and 74 of the Financial Regulation have never actually been applied in a single case yet. The excuse used was always that the relevant procedures were unclear. Anyone hoping that this will now change under the reform process has been disappointed so far. It is this very issue, an absolutely crucial one, that the consultation paper on the reform of the disciplinary procedure put forward by Vice-President Kinnock on 29 November, ignores, and it postpones a response until a later date. Understand that if you will, because I find it incomprehensible. This House has repeatedly and clearly opposed this and called for an external chamber for budgetary discipline to be established at the European Court of Auditors or Court of Justice, which should be called in whenever the financial accountability of officials is at issue.
This demand from the report by Mr van Hulten on the reform of the Commission has now been on the table since January last, and was expressly re-confirmed in the Stauner report on the 1998 discharge. I also believe that this discharge, the excellent report by Mrs van der Laan, leaves these issues, which are key to the credibility of EU administration, unresolved. We have pointed the way, and now all we can do, Commissioner, is to invite you to follow it."@en1
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