Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-11-28-Speech-3-142"
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"en.20011128.7.3-142"2
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".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, in 1995 the Member States jointly signed a convention under which, in order to safeguard Community interests and finances, the Member States make fraud against Community finances a punishable offence. Subsequently, further protocols were signed also specifying corruption and the laundering of money derived from fraud against Community finances as criminal offences.
The Commission’s report also contains 50 pages listing the measures taken by the Member States to protect Community finances in the years 1999 and 2000. It starts with Belgium extending its customs administration’s powers to a twelve mile zone outside coastal waters and includes, for example, the creation of a central control information system by Denmark’s customs and tax administration and an increase in staff at Spain’s general inspectorates for agricultural expenditure in the regions. The United Kingdom has, for example, set up a coordination point for general investigations involving the Structural Funds.
For the Structural Funds, the rapporteur, you, Mr Bösch, has included the Court of Auditors’ highly critical report, which highlights the differences between the Member States in the application of the regulation that irregularities in the implementation of the Structural Funds must be reported. I can assure you that I share your criticism and that of the Court of Auditors. We are, therefore, working very hard with the Member States to get a more uniform and above all a more thorough implementation of this reporting regulation. And this is beginning to bear fruit. I really must reiterate: even if we will probably continue to differ on the interpretation, in earlier years, transposition was extremely hesitant. We have found that it took ages for an irregularity to be reported. It is now
better, but that, of course, also means that more irregularities are being reported. It is like police statistics. Is it a good thing or a bad thing when the number of cases the police detect rises or falls?
I really must therefore ask you not to discredit those Member States that take their reporting of irregularities seriously and make frequent reports as required by the Regulation by saying they are the ‘strongholds’, because it is a difficult instrument. There is, as it were, a negative incentive: the more irregularities are reported, the more information we naturally have on the basis of which to make financial corrections. We cannot do without this mechanism.
I also agree with the rapporteur, I agree with you, Mr Bösch, that we must make the statistics more meaningful so we can see which are the new reports and which were already in the statistics before. Above all, we must look at what has been the result of the reports, what measures have been taken. OLAF is working on it, the Directorate-General for the Budget is working on it, the Directorate-General for the Regions is working on it, but it is a laborious business. I am sure we will not have the success we are actually looking for next year either, but we will see that they are becoming more meaningful, as it were, sector by sector. It also depends on cooperation with the Member States, and OLAF is working closely with the so-called COCOLAF.
I can inform you, however, that every suspected case of fraud, especially in the Structural Funds, is passed on to OLAF. The most common irregularities with the Structural Funds are concerned with cases where, for example, the Member States approve projects after the period for support has actually finished. Irregularities also appear, in particular, because other Community policies are not followed. One quite frequent irregularity is that projects have been approved without an environmental impact assessment being made first. A lot of money is spent on infrastructures, and that is a very common error, as I said. If you now ask what damage results, that is, of course, difficult to say. There is no financial damage, but there may be environmental damage because the environmental impact assessment was not carried out.
Regarding the financial corrections, another important point, we shall have tighter rules for the new support period. In the report, you have now called for all irregularities affecting financial corrections and the Structural Funds reported in the period from 1995 to 2000 to be listed individually by 15 December. We do not have that information available and will not have it available so quickly. The Commission can promise that we will now try to get this information direct for the new irregularity reports in a way that makes the reports meaningful so that we can see which irregularities result in financial loss.
How is the protection of financial interests directive likely to be treated in the Council? Unfortunately, some Member States have already taken quite a clear stance against this directive on grounds of legal dogma. You have mentioned this. All the Member States say in the Council, yes, of course, we must do something about this, but then they argue no, that is something that belongs in the third pillar, not in the first pillar. I would like to see the justice ministers who argue in this way, doing so in a public debate. Nobody would understand it. And the population will not accept them saying they can do nothing because one thing is the first pillar but another is the third pillar and the Community can only take action in the third pillar.
It is quite clear that the protection of Community interests requires Community instruments, and I am very pleased and very grateful to you that the European Parliament and the Commission are pulling in the same direction here.
There is actually nothing wrong with this convention and the protocols except that they have not all been ratified yet and therefore they are still not in force. I do not deny that in the year 2000 there was some movement in the direction of ratification. Whenever I have met with finance ministers I have constantly repeated my request that they be ratified, but the speed is determined by the slowest. The protocol that makes money laundering a crime has so far been ratified by only seven Member States. So you can see how long it would take if we were to wait for the process to be completed. We cannot accept that; that is why we have put forward the proposal for a directive that converts the main content of the protocol and the convention into a directive; this has already been discussed in Parliament on a number of occasions and has repeatedly been called for by the President himself.
I would like to thank you, Mrs Theato, and, of course, the committee as a whole, for joining us in saying that things have gone far enough and we are now going to use Community law and not rely on the convention, the third pillar instrument.
The Committee on Budgetary Control has tabled many amendments that were voted on in the Committee. The Commission shares the objective and concern expressed by many of these. But the Commission believes the present proposal for a directive is not in legal terms the right place for the vast majority of the amendments. I must therefore ask you not to take the proposal for a directive as some kind of tree on which to hang many wishes, concerns and suggestions, correct as these may be. That is especially the case with the European Public Prosecutor. Again a word on that, Mr Bösch. Of course, the Commission is the guardian of the Treaties. In our clear analysis Article 280 does not, as it appears in the Treaty, lend itself to that, not even the ‘little’ public prosecutor, to use that term again.
In our estimation, and other people do share this view, there is no basis in law for the OLAF Supervisory Committee. Neither would it be possible to choose the instrument of the regulation, because the proposal as you now have it provides, for example, for the European Court of Justice to have an investigating judge. But the duties of the Court of Justice and its judicial functions are laid down in detail in the Treaty. It is, therefore, not possible to use a regulation to institutionalise a new investigating judge. That, too, requires an amendment to the Treaty. But we shall be presenting the Green Paper in a few weeks’ time, as Mrs Theato has mentioned. The Green Paper will, of course, initiate a wide-ranging discussion. I am sure that, as protagonists of this proposal, you will take this discussion to the experts and to the Member States, so that we do not have a repeat of the situation we had in Nice, where there were only reservations and no agreement.
In our opinion, there is no legal basis for some of the other amendments, either. Provisions concerning cooperation between the national criminal prosecution authorities would be incompatible with Article 280 of the Treaty since they are concerned with the application of the Member States’ criminal law and their administration of criminal justice. Neither can the Commission go along with the suggestion of converting the directive into a regulation, since the Community cannot, at present, create law that is directly applicable in the Member States. I understand your concern and in view of the present situation I, of course, also support the call for your wish to be met swiftly, but we are a long way from a situation where the European Community can create directly applicable law. I am sure that this would really not meet with the agreement of the national parliaments either.
The Commission is able to agree without reservation to Amendment No 2 and No 11. They underline, once again, how important the introduction of the new Article 280 is for protecting the Community’s financial interests. Amendment No 27, which provides for custodial sentences, possibly leading to extradition, is essential for effectively fighting economic crime, and the Commission would also like to agree to the first sentences of Amendment No 3 and No 7 if these should be voted on separately tomorrow.
I also want to explicitly say that the proposals for extending the list of offences for the protection of financial interests are very worthy of note and, in my opinion, very much worthy of consideration, namely that market-rigging and abuse of office should be included. It is really more a question here of the strategy to be adopted. The Commission’s proposed strategy is to adopt the wording of the convention, more or less, as it stands and to present the Member States with a situation where they have already agreed to this very text and there is, therefore, now no reason to convert it into another instrument that sets a clear time for its transposition.
That is one of the legislative measures the Commission is putting forward to protect the Community’s financial interests. The Commission has listed the proposals we put forward in the year 2000 in the fraud prevention report, for example the proposal to amend the money laundering directive, the proposal to prevent counterfeiting of the euro or measures to combat product piracy. That is all part of preventing fraud, after all."@en1
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