Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-11-20-Speech-4-012"
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"en.20081120.3.4-012"2
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".
Mr President, Mr Vice-President of the European Commission, Mr President of the Court of Auditors, ladies and gentlemen, my first words are to thank you, Mr President of the Court, for the immense task you have accomplished with the Court’s auditors; I think this is an important document for our information.
As we know, this discharge is the first discharge for the financial perspective 2007-2013. It is the first with the new management, certification and audit control system introduced by the Commission. Finally, it is the last for the period of office coming to a close, because we are starting six months of work and we shall be voting in April before the European elections, at a time when the Commission has promised us a positive statement of assurance. It is now 14 years since we have had a positive statement of assurance, which gives the European Parliament cause for concern.
First, as regards the accounts, I am told that this is an unqualified opinion. Why was Galileo not consolidated? And I cannot hide the fact that I shall never get used to accounts with negative equity of 58 billion. That is one of my concerns.
So this is good news. We must be glad that, for administrative expenditure, we have a positive opinion, with low error rates and, from what we have been told, no fraud. However, the Member States have poor shared management in agriculture, cohesion and the Structural Funds, where there are too many errors – over 60% sometimes in some Member States. The Council is not here and it would be interesting to know what the Member States and the Council think about this situation, when they do not sign the national declarations and given that, with the present difficulties in public finances, the citizens will be demanding.
I think the President is right and we should consider this procedure of discharge with the committees, the Commission, the Council, Parliament, the national parliaments and the national courts of auditors, which are very conspicuous by their absence from this debate.
I should like, with your permission Mr President, to take thirty seconds' speaking time as rapporteur to express my astonishment, as my fellow Members have done, at the fact that the Council is absent. However, I have understood, Mr President of the European Court of Auditors, that you are to present your report to the Ecofin Council in a few days’ time and that, as a result, the Council cannot express an opinion before there has been an exchange of views between the various Member States.
This being so and as the finger is being pointed at the Member States on shared management, I trust we shall receive the Council’s opinion quickly and I shall take the liberty, Mr President of the European Parliament, of requesting a written question at question time asking for a prompt opinion from the Council, once it has been able to have an exchange of views on this excellent report by the European Court of Auditors."@en1
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