Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-04-03-Speech-2-136"
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"en.20010403.7.2-136"2
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"Mr President, I also welcome the reports which have been submitted to us, particularly the excellent report by Mr Blak, who should be congratulated for his equally serious and positive approach to this task.
We must certainly accept the idea that the discharge is not a populist denunciation in itself. However, once we appointed the Commission and it therefore enjoyed our trust – until we censured it, that is – the discharge procedure was a joint process of negotiation between players working in good faith and seeking to improve the management of the European Union’s budget. We must be aware that the discharge procedure is a specific task, carried out within a limited timescale – it is a financial task, which has well defined scope, we can grant the discharge or we can postpone it, but we can never reject it outright, because that would require upsetting the sequence of balances. The aim of the discharge, at the end of the day, is not to repeat the act of authorising the budget. The discharge is not an opportunistic step, but a step to punish irregularities and to punish a possible lack of optimal management. The discharge is a framework which we must hold onto if we wish to avoid certain dramatic events being repeated.
Personally speaking, I welcome all of the above. I shall make three comments on what has happened here this year. First of all, I acknowledge that there is a serious problem, namely the imbalance between the Commission and Member States’ responsibilities in relation to the discharge. Eighty per cent of the appropriations are still spent by Member States and we grant discharge to the Commission. That is why I believe it is difficult for us to demand in a suitably effective manner the improvement of a positive Statement of Assurance. We are punishing those who are only partially responsible for what is happening to them. Before imposing sanctions on the Commission, I would like the various pockets of Eurosceptics to allow more extensive monitoring in their own countries on the way in which spending is carried out in Member States.
My second comment – and I am hurrying through this – concerns relations between OLAF and the European Parliament, which have not yet settled. In this case, the need for transparency must be reconciled with maintaining the confidentiality of certain information and of the individual’s right to protection. That does not always happen. Lastly, we are being very badly affected by an imbalance, on the issue of fraud, between a repressive and largely administrative unit and a judicial unit with powers of jurisdiction that is still in its infancy. That is what constitutes the real scandal in the Fléchard affair. The misunderstandings of the Fléchard case can be explained by the fact that we, the European Union and the Commission, were in a position to levy punishment in administrative terms, without showing consideration for the individual’s right to protection. It is essential that we correct this imbalance by enhancing our powers of jurisdiction."@en1
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