Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-04-22-Speech-3-310"
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"en.20090422.53.3-310"2
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".
Mr President, I wish to begin by saying that I very much regret the fact that we are going to conduct this debate in the absence of the Council – the very Council whose budget we are about to discuss. It is absurd, of course, that the Council should simply choose to ignore this debate in this way, given that the Committee on Budgetary Control has voted by a very large majority to recommend that Parliament postpone its discharge decision for the Council’s 2007 budget.
Why have we done this? Is it because we suspect some fraud or irregularity? The answer is ‘no’, because we have no indication or information which points in that direction. So why, then, have we done it? We have proposed that the grant of the Council’s discharge be postponed, because our committee has not yet received any official reply from the Council regarding a series of ambiguities in the budget. These ambiguities may well, in fact, be the result of misunderstandings, but the Council has declined to clear up these misunderstandings. Naturally, it could have done so by replying to our questions.
In accordance with paragraph 42 of the Interinstitutional Agreement, no operational appropriations for the Common Foreign and Security Policy may appear in the Council’s budget. As representatives of the European taxpayer, we have the task of ensuring compliance with this agreement. However, in order to do so, we must be given the chance not only to ask questions about the Council’s budget, but also to obtain answers to those questions.
In the annex to the report we have listed a number of questions, some of which are actually quite straightforward, and it should not be difficult to provide an answer to them. For example: how many accounts outside the budget did the Council have in 2007? What funds did they cover and what were they spent on? Another question is: can the Council offer any explanation as to how its own internal auditor could have come to the conclusion that there were shortcomings in the control and verification of invoices? Yet another one: is there any explanation as to why it has been necessary to transfer substantial amounts from the translation budget line to the travel budget line, year after year? Despite repeated calls from me, as rapporteur, and from the committee as a whole, the Council has to date given no official reply to these questions.
That causes great difficulties, of course, not only for the committee, but for the whole of Parliament, as well, because how can we grant discharge for a budget, in other words accountably claim to our electorate that this budget is correct, without knowing what lies behind the figures? That would be absurd.
We on the Committee on Budgetary Control are nice people. This is why we are giving the Council one more chance to answer our questions. We, therefore, recommend to Parliament that it postpone granting discharge for the Council’s budget. This will allow the issue to be raised again in November and give the Council a few more months to consider whether or not transparency is better than secrecy.
I hope that with today’s debate and tomorrow’s vote we will send a clear message that we do not want to be a rubber stamp for the forces of darkness. We want openness, we want transparency and we want a full insight into how taxpayers’ money is being spent. That is what we want today and that is what we want after the elections in June."@en1
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