Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-09-24-Speech-2-056"
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"Mr President, Commissioner, first of all, I wish to thank all my fellow Members who have been kind enough to refer to the work that we have produced in this field and I should like to say that, on this matter, the Committee on Budgetary Control has, in fact, worked extremely well. We have all shared the same vision, which essentially we all hold with regard to the need to protect our financial interests, and we have produced a piece of work that is essentially collective.
Having said this, I should also like to thank the Commissioner for the attention that she has paid to this report, but I must say, Commissioner, that your intervention raised some questions that I think are absolutely crucial to clarify. And, with the permission of the President, I should like to ask you four very specific questions highlighted by this report:
Firstly, the Commissioner tells us that Article 280 only concerns fraud and that this regulation is about scrutiny. Commissioner, this is not the first time that I have heard the Commission say this, but I am tempted to say that perhaps the Commission needs to take a closer look at Article 280. Because, and to translate freely from the English version, the first paragraph of this very Article states that ‘the Community and the Member States shall counter fraud and any other illegal activities affecting the financial interests of the Community’. It is quite clear, therefore, from the wording of Article 280 that we are not only dealing with fraud but with all and any illegal activity that threatens the financial interests of the Community. It is, therefore, perfectly clear that this regulation falls entirely within the scope of this protection, and I must say that the overwhelming majority of processes to recover money undertaken by the Community are done carried out under this regulation. I would say that perhaps around three-quarters of these processes and three-quarters of the appropriations recovered fall under this regulation. How, then, can the Commission say something like this – that this has nothing to do with Article 280, when this regulation is a straightforward transcription of what is laid down in Article 280?
Secondly, the Commissioner says that the performance of this regulation has been satisfactory. As has already been said, I do not believe we can look at this regulation in isolation from the other regulations and from the entire legal structure intended to protect the financial interests of the Community. From this point of view, I only wish to point out once again the scandal that I have already mentioned; the scandal of the butter falsified by the Camorra of Naples and which had the cooperation of major European milk-product undertakings in almost all large European countries. This is a scandal that started in 1995, that involved at least 35 thousand tonnes of falsified butter, and which was only stopped in the year 2000, in other words, 35 thousand tonnes of butter were falsified over five years, involving large undertakings in France, Germany, Belgium and probably in other countries. And not once did this regulation enable the Commission to understand the first thing about this falsification of butter. A local investigation had to be conducted by the Italian police in Naples for this scandal to start to be unravelled. We are now in 2002, and we still do not know which undertakings are involved and what the Commission intends to do to these undertakings. And the Commissioner thinks that this is satisfactory. Please forgive me for saying so, but this is not satisfactory. I do not think it is satisfactory that food falsification has almost doubled between the year 2000 and 2001, which is, for example, another figure that has appeared in the press and which has not, so far, been denied by the Commission. This, as far as I am concerned, is not satisfactory;
Thirdly, Commissioner, we have the issue of transparency. I have heard the Commissioner call for transparency – and rightly so – in the most varied circumstances. In these circumstances, however, I do not understand why it is that when we reach this point, the Commission and, therefore, also the Commissioner, are no longer calling for transparency. How is it possible that we can go onto the Internet and see who is applying for grants funded by the Community science Programme, for example, and who has received these grants, but we cannot find out which multinationals receive millions and millions of euros to export European food surpluses or to dispose of them on the internal market? Why is this a State secret? Why is the Commission not telling us which undertakings these are? How much are they receiving? For what purpose? What aspect of this needs to remain secret? And here, as our fellow Members have already said, and quite rightly so, our problem is not just with the Commission, but also with our fellow Members from the PPE and the Liberals, who have also hitherto refused to accept that this rule, which I believe is fundamentally transparent, is included in the regulation;
Lastly, Commissioner, I have a question to ask you about the definition of the protection of the Community’s financial interests. Because this definition has been made in the following way: the falsification of milk products is only considered to be a problem for the Community if the perpetrators are in receipt of a Community subsidy. In other words, if they do not receive this subsidy, it is no longer an issue for the Community. This is completely absurd, Commissioner, for the following reasons: milk producers exceed their reference quantity – in other words, they are producing milk – and this milk has not been subsidised – the Community allows the industry that buys their milk to immediately enforce preventive retention, in other words, even before a quota surplus is observed, a preventive retention of money is made to pay a fine on the quota. In other words, even if these farmers have committed no offence, have not even increased their milk production, money is nonetheless taken from them. This is what is happening to milk producers. If we have an undertaking that is producing ‘fake’ milk products, in other words, that is making butter without milk, that is making butter with a huge variety of things that should never be used in any food product; totally artificial things, then the Community says the following: well, this is not our problem unless Community export subsidies have been received. This makes no sense at all! This is the Community doctrine, however, and has been the doctrine advocated in the Committee on Budgetary Control, year after year, and is still being advocated. I cannot accept this, Commissioner! I would like you also to explain to us clearly why the Commission is adopting this attitude, because I cannot explain it to anyone! I cannot go to the farmers of the region that I represent here and tell them something like this, because there is no possible explanation for this and therefore I should like the Commission to clearly explain the reason for this incongruity."@en1
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