Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-02-18-Speech-1-100"
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"en.20080218.21.1-100"2
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"Mr President, I wish to thank honourable Members very much for their support for this transparency action, which has been a common action: in all issues, the Commission has always felt it had strong support from Parliament.
There are two things I want to say. The first concerns the information available on end beneficiaries. I consider this to be an amazing change. When, together with some Members of Parliament, we started to initiate this at the beginning of 2004, there was no great hope that it would be implemented. But the political decision has now been taken, and the year 2009 is the final year by which the information on end beneficiaries of 2008 will and must be published.
So, politically the decision has been taken. This is a great step forward. Now the technicalities remain to be solved. That is not easy at all, because guidelines have now been issued on what this information on end beneficiaries should look like. But of course many of you raised the issue of workable search engines, and this is really not an easy task. Of course, we will have a portal via which it will be possible to access the information in the Member States, and access information about end beneficiaries.
I foresee a lot of technical problems, but those technical problems – nothing is perfect, and everything takes a little time – definitely should not undermine the importance of this great change.
Concerning the famous national declarations, I must again say that the situation has completely changed in these three years. When I first appeared in Council to discuss these issues, these were completely out of the question. Today you have the annual summaries – we had already received 22 so far, and perhaps even more now. We will assess the quality together, and there definitely will be an improvement.
So the understanding is that we have shared management problems, and we must also share information about the work – how we manage the Structural Funds. That understanding has increased tremendously in Member States too. We will also try to fill out the idea of more comprehensive national declarations with specific substance. You know as well as I do that there are certain Member States that are still very reluctant to have this greater involvement, but we already have a certain degree of involvement.
As concerns international money, that is a something of a different issue. The issue of how this information should be made available will probably also be discussed within the framework of COCOBU. However, we are partners in international agreements and do not manage them directly. Information on what we manage directly must be made available, but we are partners in very big international poolings. That is a little different.
Concerning expert groups, as I said in COCOBU, I can repeat here that we have a commitment to publish the list of permanent experts. This is really a question of definition: what kind of experts should be included on this list. This is a debate, and some experts who fulfil certain confidential tasks of assessing projects and people should not be so transparent, probably. There are some nuances. However, the commitment exists and I have been informed that we are ready to publish a long list of permanent experts. There is the question of all those national experts sent by Member States participating in certain bodies, whose names will be sent afterwards, not before, but there is at least the commitment that there should be no big secret as to who is advising us.
My last point, in response to an issue which was raised, is that the Commission has no intention to propose how Parliament should deal with its own rules, and what the declarations of economic interest should consist of. I can say only two things: this ethical space is a common space – if something happens in one institution, it definitely has an immediate effect on other institutions. We must, of course, address all these questions on the basis of common sense, and not go to absurd lengths and into unnecessary details, but only into the relevant issues, in order to avoid a real conflict of interests."@en1
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