Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-10-10-Speech-3-234"
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"en.20071010.23.3-234"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, the House much prefers dealing with expenditure to revenue – and so it is to Mr Staes’ great credit that we are today turning to the trifle of revenue for once. All the same, this is a matter of EUR 17 billion in VAT and own resources and EUR 14 billion in customs duties – which is almost 30%. In my opinion, it is good that we are addressing this issue today.
Evidently, there are only winners here, and the Commissioner, too, deserves our congratulations for this. We are pleased that we have managed to find a way –in cooperation with the Member States. It is essential to shore up the future of OLAF, the European Anti-Fraud Office, to enable it to play its role within the EU even better and more efficiently. Congratulations are due for what OLAF has shown us so far and what we are seeing before us now. We are all very proud of these successes, as it was these experts, of course, who made them possible. It was not a foregone conclusion, particularly given the subject, that we would make real progress with the counterfeit tobacco products dossier or that the Member States, too, would cooperate.
We should like this scenario to be replicated in the case of other dossiers concerning the protection of the financial interests of the Union, for example the fight against VAT fraud. Then we would have true winners: the European taxpayers who sent us here and have certain expectations.
I believe that continuing the fight against cigarette smuggling is an important task, that there is an urgent need to call in an investigator from OLAF in Beijing, and that we need to strengthen the anti-fraud presence worldwide. The question to the Commission now would be how to step up the pressure on other cigarette manufacturers to induce them to subscribe to the agreement between Philip Morris and the Community in the Member States. In my opinion, we must consider very specifically how to follow this up and how to continue working on this issue, as failure to do so would endanger our own credibility."@en1
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