Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-03-29-Speech-1-081"
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"en.20040329.8.1-081"2
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"Thank you, Mr President; in 2002, EUR 1.8 billion went astray as a result of fraud and irregularities, which amounts, approximately, to an increase of a cool 36% over the previous year, and the greatest increases are to be found in the areas of own resources and structural policy. That may be interesting, but there is nothing new about it.
It all adds up to a sorry story, Commissioner, and you cannot put a positive spin on it. It could be said that fraud is continuing regardless. A 36% rate of increase may well be desirable in other areas, but it is nothing more or less than a disaster in the anti-fraud field. It actually reveals that you have nothing to show for the four and a half years that you have served as a Commissioner. Let us remind ourselves how the Prodi Commission took office in the autumn of 1999 grandiosely committing itself to, and demanding, zero tolerance for fraud and irregularities. Everything was to be different after the fall of the Santer Commission – and what happened? One might say that one scandal gave way to another. Let me remind you of the way you froze out the chief accountant after she said that the whole reform was not going as smoothly as you had told the outside world it was. You changed the Financial Regulation, but without, in my view, making it more transparent or any clearer; instead, you did it by way of a jungle of regulations that nobody, at the end of the day, knows their way around. Indeed, your cardinal error, in my view, was to do away with the independent position of Financial Controller, and to replace it with an internal audit service, one that is neither independent nor – it would appear – very appealing, in view of the fact that you will, in April, be losing its director, who is also making good his escape. An accounting system has come to light that is described quite rightly in the press as being ‘as full of holes as a Swiss cheese’ and ‘as open as a bank vault’.
Finally, we have the Eurostat affair, with its secret accounts and losses acknowledged as totalling at least EUR 8 million. I do not mean it as praise, Commissioner, when I call that a fantastic result; only a cynic could congratulate you on it. As always, though, you are unaware of any wrongdoing. All the Commissioners responsible are simply wriggling out of it and hiding themselves in the regulatory jungle that they themselves have created. That none of this encourages any confidence on the part of the European public is evidently a matter of no concern to you; it would appear that the prevalent attitude is still that one can be more free and easy with Europe’s money than with that of the Member States."@en1
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