Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-11-26-Speech-4-057"
| Predicate | Value (sorted: default) |
|---|---|
| rdf:type | |
| dcterms:Date | |
| dcterms:Is Part Of | |
| dcterms:Language | |
| lpv:document identification number |
"en.20091126.3.4-057"2
|
| lpv:hasSubsequent | |
| lpv:speaker | |
| lpv:spoken text |
"Madam President, thank you for this debate and for the good words addressed to the Commission. I have two points relating to the past, from 2008 and recent years. Firstly, one important thing was underlined: transparency. I want to remind you that together we have made a big breakthrough. All information about beneficiaries of EU funds is now public and this has also been one of the major changes during this period.
The second fact from the past is that we discussed how much money has been lost and how much money should be recovered, amongst other things. I would like to illustrate this with one number, from what is a very complicated title. It is in Annex VI to our Synthesis report and is the ‘summary of waivers of recoveries’, which actually means an amount of money which is completely and irreversibly lost. In the 2008 Synthesis report, this was EUR 18 380 363.22, which is under 0.01% of the EU budget. This is lost. We have discussed all these billions which have not been properly managed in the structural funds, but something is recovered finally. The process is not perfect and we have to work hard on this and sometimes errors are corrected. It is a long process and we must take it very seriously.
Now some points for the future. In the very near future, we will start discussions on the new Financial Regulation and the new budget perspectives. Very many things are linked to this process. National declarations and the participation of Member States need a stronger legal basis. We can clearly go ahead with this simplification, discussed so much and so many times here. As President Caldeira has already said, objectives are defined by more than 500 programmes accepted by the Commission, Parliament and Council. Every programme has its own legal basis, its own objectives, and everything must be measured, including the money which has been spent in accordance with these objectives. That is a key issue.
At the last plenary session when we discussed the discharge for 2007, one idea was to reduce the number of programmes and to have bigger projects and bigger programmes which are much easier to survey. This is a key issue and, as one Member said was the case with rural development, you cannot measure objectives – especially in external actions, where you have very political objectives – and say that those objectives are being achieved. This is a key issue, but one within the framework of the future discussions on financial regulations.
Concerning dialogue, which was underlined here as important, I must say that we have tried to do our best to have good dialogue with Parliament, with the Committee on Budgetary Control and with the Court of Auditors. I myself like to debate everything with people with different views, different attitudes and different assessments. That is normal life. What I do not like is that some people deliberately and constantly use incorrect facts. You cannot have a dialogue when the facts are not correct. We can have different assessments, different interpretations and different views, but the facts must be correct. I strongly wish that in our future dialogue, this principle will also be respected."@en1
|
| lpv:unclassifiedMetadata | |
| lpv:videoURI |
Named graphs describing this resource:
The resource appears as object in 2 triples