Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-05-10-Speech-2-016-000"
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"en.20110510.4.2-016-000"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, firstly, I will only speak in Hungarian as an introduction, and then I will continue in English when speaking as a Member of the Council, but since as a MEP I always speak in Hungarian in this room, I will continue to do so. Secondly, I would like to ask Mr President to allow me the two minutes at the end of the debate regardless of when my machine is switched off. I hope that the Council will be granted enough time, as in previous debates.
This debate comes at a time of economic and financial crisis when many Member States have had to cut their national budgets and keep their expenditure under strict control. European citizens and taxpayers are rightly paying ever closer attention to the proper spending of EU funds. I therefore welcome the opportunity to present the views of the Council and the Hungarian Presidency during this debate.
Of course it is right that the budgets of each of the institutions are part of the wider system of control and scrutiny. For too long we have operated under the ‘gentleman’s agreement’ originating from 1970, according to which both Parliament and the Council have refrained from examining each other’s administrative expenditure.
I think we both accept that such an agreement is no longer appropriate in today’s climate after the Lisbon Treaty. That is why the Council has proposed, and is ready to discuss, new arrangements for governing the long-term cooperation between our two institutions involved in the discharge procedure. We have put forward a proposal and we look forward to discussing it with you. I strongly believe that it is in both our interests to cooperate in this area, and no less important to show Europe’s citizens that we are cooperating. I therefore invite Parliament to begin discussions on this issue.
I personally ask you, Mr President, to do your best to appoint your delegation to negotiate with us at a political level. We are ready to share our ideas with you. More generally we share your concern that the EU budget be correctly implemented. We have examined in detail the Commission’s annual accounts as well as the observations made by the European Court of Auditors in its annual report.
At the end of February, I myself presented to the Committee on Budgetary Control the Council’s recommendations on the discharge to the Commission for the implementation of the budget. I welcome the fact that many of the points highlighted by the Council have been taken up by your institution as well. The Council recommended granting discharge to the Commission, and it acknowledged the overall improvements identified by the Court. These are part of a welcome trend and are due largely to the efforts over recent years by both the Commission and the Member States. Yet despite these positive signs the overall result is not yet satisfactory and the Court still had to qualify its opinion for 2009.
I would like to briefly mention these issues: we need a serious discussion; we need long-term cooperation and a long-term agreement with you: following on from the gentleman’s agreement that is what we should like to do. We stand by the discharge procedure on the basis of the Court of Auditors’ findings because that is the rule, that is the Treaty issue; and we also expect Parliament and ourselves to take into account the complexity of simplifying existing regulations and enhancing their transparency.
I hope that this kind of problem, whereby the Council discharge has been postponed by Parliament, will never come up in the future again so I ask that even during the Hungarian Presidency we should have a political discussion and agreement.
That is my personal request to you, to Parliament and to you, Mr President."@en1
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