Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-11-18-Speech-2-014"
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"en.20031118.2.2-014"2
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"Mr President, on behalf of the Union for Europe of the Nations Group, I should like to express sympathy and respect for the Italian police officers who, together with American and British soldiers, have been killed by terrorists in Iraq since Parliament last met. In the same way, we should like to express our sympathy and respect for those who lost their lives in the attacks on the synagogues in Turkey. The western world must stand united in combating terrorism.
I should also like to talk about Commission President Prodi’s statement on the Eurostat scandal. Listening to his statement, as we have done today in the Committee on Budgetary Control, one would imagine that we had all just emerged from the primeval forest and that public administration was still something to be invented. Mr Prodi has reported on everything that does not work, referring to the lack of communication between the Commission and the control bodies, the OLAF internal audit, Parliament etc.
Mr Prodi now promises that matters will be improved, but these problems are of course known by all governments with much larger administrations than the Commission’s. In all normal democracies, the political systems and administrations are developed in such a way that embezzlement and fraud are prevented or discovered very quickly. The Commission still has to devise all these arrangements. This can only be interpreted as an expression of total incompetence on the part of the Commission and as a lack of will in a system characterised by a down-at-heel administrative culture. That is why the Committee on Budgetary Control has such a lot of difficulty obtaining the analysis reports and has a duty of confidentiality imposed upon it with regard to everything it knows. Someone has known about the scandal for a very long time, and someone has wished to conceal it. Mr Prodi says that his reform, which was begun in 1999, is already working. How, then, will he explain the fact that the press and the European Parliament knew about the Eurostat scandal a good year before MEPs forced the Commission to act.
Mr Prodi says that OLAF had been working on fraud in Eurostat for several years, without providing a word of information to the Commission, yet he says he has every confidence in Mr Brüner and OLAF. There are three possible explanations: either the Commission gave OLAF’s director completely fatuous instructions, with the result that he did not keep the Commission informed; or the Commission wished to leave unpleasant matters on the back burner for years in a secretive OLAF; or OLAF’s management is appallingly naive and does not understand the political necessity of sounding the alarm bells so that the Commission is warned of serious fraud.
Mr Prodi says that he has now taken some tough decisions. No, Mr Prodi, you have not. You have merely suspended a few criminal bosses on full wages, and you have only done it under pressure from the Committee on Budgetary Control and Parliament. You bear full responsibility. This Parliament will be naive if it gives discharge for your administration."@en1
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