Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-05-10-Speech-4-014-000"
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"en.20120510.9.4-014-000"2
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"Madam President, I will speak English. Normally, I speak Swedish in plenary, but I did all the rest of the work in English and when I tried to prepare the Swedish, I realised that some of the words would be easier – this once – in English, because I had used them during the whole process.
After an extensive process in committee, the report on discharge for the Commission for the financial year 2010 has now arrived in plenary. First of all, I would like to express my gratitude to both the European Court of Auditors and the European Commission for their very fruitful and professional cooperation during this process. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the opinion-giving committees for their input. Discharge is one of the main prerogatives of the European Parliament, and it is important that we all try to take part in it in one way or another.
Let me turn to the most important question of any discharge procedure: whether or not to grant discharge. As you can see in the report adopted in the committee, which followed my recommendation to grant discharge to the Commission for the financial year 2010, this was not an easy decision. We know that this is the 17th year that the Commission has not received a clean bill from the Court, and we can even see some small increases in error rates in certain areas.
The reason we came to the conclusion we did is that we got adequate responses from the Commission to the four priority actions that the Commission needs to address in the upcoming months. Specifically, the following four points for action will be addressed by the Commission and I hope it will confirm this today: firstly, financial engineering instruments; secondly, the Commission’s accountability instruments; thirdly, pre-financing; and, fourthly, the Commission’s supervisory role in the cohesion area.
We want action in all of these areas in exchange for discharge. The financial engineering instruments kept us busy for most of the time. The Court of Auditors found severe weaknesses in the implementation of these instruments, especially in the area of cohesion. As you all are aware, the Commission proposed using those instruments even more often in the future, which is why we invested a lot of effort in thinking about how we could correct the weaknesses detected.
The Commission is now being asked, in particular, to objectively and critically evaluate the use of those instruments and report back, and to assess the specific risks attached to the use of these instruments. Some people make it sound like these instruments are some kind of alchemy that create gold out of nothing, but we see risk and we see costs, and we want them to be evaluated so that we know exactly what consequences they will have.
The second point I mentioned concerns how the Commission assumes its financial responsibility for implementing the EU budget. At the centre of that question is the annual activity report and the synthesis report. We need these to be improved and we need them to actually show more than they hide. As a result of our deliberations, the committee required that the Commission deliver a political declaration in which it accepts its final and overall responsibility for the implementation of the budget, including the part which is implemented under shared management.
We also need the Commission to strengthen its annual activity report and for the signature of the Commissioner responsible to be added next to that of the Director-General, to show that the Commission assumes responsibility. We also want the Commission to analyse whether the Commission’s own corporate governance arrangements could be further improved, for example, by taking on some of the obligations it lays down on others in its Green Paper on EU corporate governance."@en1
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