Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-03-13-Speech-2-210"
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"en.20010313.14.2-210"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, I feel the rapporteur deserves to be congratulated on the report. I believe he has incorporated very positive elements into it and endeavoured to steer a course avoiding both exaggeration and indifference.
In order not to look the other way, I shall focus on one of the matters covered in the report – that of flax – and put some figures to the House. For instance, according to the figures, in my country, Spain, flax was grown on 3 376 hectares during the 1994-95 season. However, by the 1998-99 season it was already being cultivated on 100 000 hectares. The initial subsidy in 1994-95 amounted to ESP 411 million, whereas by 1998-99 it had risen to ESP 10 000 million.
After the Spanish authorities reported the fraud, the area used for the cultivation of flax decreased as if by magic. Those 100 000 hectares were reduced to less than 1000. As a result, the subsidy fell to below ESP 100 million.
Despite all this data, the head of the Ministry of Agriculture at the time maintained it was all part of an opposition campaign. True, she recently changed her mind and stated that had not been the case, but that essentially the opposition was to blame.
I should like to focus on the type of liability the House might invoke. In the first place, there is penal liability as it applies to individual owners of processing plants. They were privy to special information – I am not referring to information about the regulations, which was in the public domain, but information on how they could be got round. These persons had at their disposal the capital required to set up the companies. Most importantly, they were sitting pretty, holding high office in the Ministry of Agriculture.
It is therefore appropriate to invoke strictly penal liability for them and for the producers who also played the game. Parliament and the relevant institutions should do precisely that.
There is another type of liability: specific political liability. This means establishing whether any of the players directly involved in the fraud had been appointed to public political office by an institution in Spain. It has to be said that such was indeed the case. One of the highest-ranking officials within the Ministry of Agriculture, the Chair of the European Agricultural Guarantee Fund, was closely connected with flax processing companies.
Lastly, there is also administrative liability. If this does apply, we should call the Commission and national and local authorities to account. We should not, however, create confusion and adopt the course advocated by Mr Bösch, insisting that liabilities be itemised in detail."@en1
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