Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-04-21-Speech-3-364"
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"en.20040421.16.3-364"2
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"Mr President, we have attempted to apportion the blame for what happened, but it has not been possible. In our opinion, no one believes they are to blame for anything at all. This was the conclusion of the report, submitted by the so-called Committee of Wise Men in March 1999, into the problems of the earlier Santer Commission.
The same can be said of the Eurostat scandal. All the defence mechanisms have been set in motion. Commissioner Solbes is not to blame because he does not read newspapers. Commissioner Kinnock is not to blame because he was not listening when Mr Blak told him what Mrs Schmidt Brown had said. Commissioner Schreyer was not to blame because she does not read audit reports, and Mr Prodi, the President of the Commission, is not at all to blame because he obviously ensured that no information got through to him either from the European Parliament or the press, and if you do not know about something you cannot be to blame for it, as Mr Prodi says.
The only thing one might wonder is how people with so little ability to perceive what is going on around them have come to be so high up.
The truth is, of course, that they had known what was going on at Eurostat for at least a year, but they kept under wraps something that should not have been kept under wraps. You could call it misplaced loyalty to a corrupt system. You could call it nepotism. Whatever you call it, it is not worthy of an inter-European institution. That is why we want to establish who is to blame, but the system is designed to prevent us from doing so.
In a normal democracy, critics within a parliament can move a vote of censure. This occasionally happens in our Member States. If a government has a solid majority, it will be fairly indifferent. A government that wins a vote of censure generally comes out of the vote stronger. In this case, the Commission is certain to win, because the majority here in Parliament do not wish blame to be apportioned, and those of us tabling this motion of censure know that we will lose.
Nonetheless, those loyal to the Commission have been busy preventing us from holding this debate and the subsequent vote at all. Signatures have been placed under suspicion and removed for no objective reason, and Members have been pressurised into withdrawing their signatures. That is not true parliamentarianism. There is something rotten permeating the entire issue of Eurostat, and a majority in Parliament do not want to contribute to apportioning the blame.
I recommend that Members vote in favour of our motion of censure."@en1
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