Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-04-21-Speech-3-359"
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"en.20040421.16.3-359"2
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"Mr President, this motion is to censure the whole Commission. Alas, we do not currently have the power in this House to censure individuals - we have only this nuclear option.
Perhaps in Eurostat's case this is the best thing. The problem here is that the Commissioners are happy to make great political statements on policy but absolutely refuse to take political responsibility for problems that occur in their DGs. Effective political control, proper communication, procedures and financial checks and balances were either not in place in Eurostat, failed to work, or were simply ignored. In fact all the warning signs were completely ignored.
In this case, EUR 5 million went missing because of fraud and bad management controls. Yet the only person to be arrested was a journalist - Hans-Martin Tillack - who chose to report this in
and whose office was raided again today. It is not amazing that OLAF can act with such speed involving police in trying to get the name of a journalist and checking his bank accounts in days. However, if you compare this to the Eurostat case, where after more than a year of investigations we have basically nothing, it begs the question of the priorities of various individuals within the DG responsible.
During the discharge process for 2001, Eurostat was one of our rapporteur's key themes. We now know that not all the information we needed at the time was made available to this House. Many MEPs are now on record as saying that if they had been given all the facts at the time, they would have voted against discharge for those accounts last year. If the Commission and the leaders of all the political groups in this Parliament had put half as much energy into solving the systemic problems shown up by the Eurostat case as they have in trying to block this motion from having an airing on the floor of the House, then all these problems could have been solved years ago.
This Commission deserves to be censured, and future Commissioners need to know that they will take political responsibility for the actions of their DGs."@en1
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