Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-12-02-Speech-4-025"

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"en.20041202.4.4-025"2
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"Mr President, I would like to start by expressing my congratulations to the Court of Auditors on this report. Their reports in the past have been more feeble than this one, which I regard as an important and good one, particularly as we are about to negotiate a Financial Perspective. The Commission bears a great deal of responsibility in this respect. It is simply not on that we should end up getting stick from the finance ministers of those very countries that are not implementing the Structural Funds, when we have been shovelling over EUR 100 billion in that direction in particular. This, Commissioner, is where we have to change the objectives for the Financial Perspective. The same is the case when we see, yet again, where the major shortcomings and the frauds are to be found. Here I am thinking of the whole area of export refunds for agricultural produce. The ball is now in the Commission’s court. For as long as we have policies like this in the European Union, we will carry on seeing headlines slating European policy. The lesson this report can teach us is that these policies need to be abandoned. A further point to which I would like to draw attention is the fact that we set up pre-accession aid for the ten new Member States. Until these countries acceded, we were seeing 15% of it taken up. Today I have heard from the Commissioner with responsibility for SAPARD that funds are flowing out of it at a marvellous rate, even though it is an instrument for use before accession rather than after it. There will be more enlargements; indeed, they are already imminent. Let us learn a lesson from this one. This is the Commission’s responsibility, and this is where things can be speeded up a bit. If they are, this report will turn out to be a great success. The people at the Court of Auditors are not historians, nor are we in this House. We want to draw positive conclusions from the points of criticism made by the Court of Auditors."@en1

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