Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-06-12-Speech-3-170"
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"en.20020612.5.3-170"2
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".
Mr President, after the fine proposals for our dream Europe, we must come down to earth to the bad news of Europe as it is at present. The report of which I am the rapporteur examines three annual reports by the Commission relating to the year 2000: the report on the Structural Funds, the report on the Cohesion Fund and the report on the Instrument for Structural Policy for Pre-Accession. If Commissioner Barnier, the Commissioner responsible for regional policy, were here, I would have read him what he said before this House during the year 2000, but he is not here so I will not bother with that.
The year 2000 was the first year in which the coordination of Structural Funds and Cohesion Fund interventions laid down by the 1999 regulations was actually implemented. In the light of the report by the Commission itself and both the annual and special reports of the Court of Auditors, we have noted that the simplification and speeding-up of implementing procedures for structural measures promised by the Commission in Agenda 2000 and implemented through the adoption of new regulations did not have any effect. As was pointed out, again by the Commission, with regard to the rates of implementation of the Structural Funds objectives overall, there were delays similar to those recorded in 1994. It was only thanks to the 7% advance and automatic annual commitment that it was possible to attain rates of implementation of 13% for commitments and 5% for payments. If we consider the objectives, Community initiatives and innovative measures as a whole, only 51.8% of the appropriations available for the year 2000 were committed, and that is without taking into account the situation of the new Community initiatives, which is truly unbelievable. Despite the fact that the Community initiatives were scaled down and simplified with the intention of making them more effective and were thus reduced to four – Leader, Interreg, Equal and Urban – the rate of budgetary implementation was zero for both commitments and payments, and no measures were approved. Furthermore, the guidelines for the innovative measures were not adopted until the beginning of 2001.
Clearly, these data induce us to raise the purely rhetorical question of whether the new programming rules really make it possible to ensure transparency of budget management and avoid liquidity bottlenecks. We cannot conceal our fear that the delays that affected the implementation of Structural Funds and Cohesion Fund resources in 2000 might jeopardise the attainment of the goals charted for the crucial 2002-2006 programming period, and that is without even considering the measures from the previous periods. We were surprised to learn that, at the end of 2000, 11 years after the closure of commitments and nine years after the final date for making payments, as many as 35 programmes from before 1989 were still open. Moreover, there were as many as 73 operating programmes from the 1989-1993 period still open too. What can we say? We note that the non-extendable deadlines and the threats of stringent coercive measures repeatedly proposed by the Commission were once again disregarded.
Moving on to monitoring and evaluation: in its annual report for 2000 and its Special Report for 2001, the Court of Auditors has detected serious shortcomings in the management and control systems of the Commission and Member States. The seriousness of the errors in intermediate payment declarations is the same as in previous years and the most frequent errors are similar to those previously recorded in various Member States.
Lastly, we agree with the opinion of the Court of Auditors that checks should meet internationally accepted standards, including provisions stipulating that those carrying out the checks should be independent of those implementing the project, which is not the case at present.
I will end with ISPA, which would appear to be the reason my report has been slipped into the enlargement melting pot. We note that the Commission committed approximately one third of the funds earmarked for 2000 during the first year of programming and we wish to see implementation stepped up considerably so as to guarantee full use of these resources, which are vital to the balanced development of the candidate countries.
Lastly, I am absolutely astounded that, in a debate on enlargement which includes a discussion on Hungary, not one Member has mentioned that, on 7 September 2001, Hungary appeared on the updated list of countries and territories which were not cooperating with the FATF, the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering, a group which is part of the OECD, which is a body to which the European Union itself belongs.
Fine, we did not realise what was going on in Hungary and we will continue to pretend that everything is going well and that our dream Europe will be better than the one we have today on which I have reported."@en1
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