Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, the term of office of eight members of the European Court of Auditors will expire at the beginning of next year. I am sorry that the Finnish Presidency of the Council is now leaving us because the Finns also wish to reappoint their present member of the Court of Auditors. Under Article 247 paragraph 3 of the Treaty founding the European Community and other similar provisions in the ECSC and EURATOM treaties, Parliament must give its opinion on the candidates before the Council unanimously appoints or reappoints the members of the Court of Auditors for a period of six years. The Council asked Parliament to give its opinion in a letter dated 3 November 1999, which also contained the names and curricula vitae of the candidates. The candidates for new appointments were Mr Reynders from Belgium, Mrs Geoghegan-Quinn from Ireland, Mr Caldeira from Portugal and Mr Fabra Vallés from Spain and the candidates for reappointment were Mr Mohr from Denmark, Mr Salmi from Finland, Mr Clemente from Italy and Mr Karlsson from Sweden, in alphabetical order of the proposing countries. As required under Article 35 of our Rules of Procedure, the Committee on Budgetary Control interviewed and questioned the proposed candidates individually on 22 and 23 November 1999 on the basis of the provisions of the Treaty which require that candidates must hold or have held or be particularly suitable for an auditing office. Impartiality is the most important requirement. We also based our deliberations and appraisals on the guidelines in the 1992 and 1995 parliamentary resolutions by Mr Lamassoure and Mr Bourlanges. As a result, I am in a position to inform you that, having conducted a detailed examination, the Committee on Budgetary Control has come to the conclusion that the candidates meet the criteria for high office at the Court of Auditors and has returned a positive opinion on all eight candidates. We particularly welcome the fact that, if Parliament gives its assent, the 15 members of the Court of Auditors will include two women. I recall that our condition at the last appointment was that at least one of the candidates for appointment should be a woman and that Parliament would not otherwise give its assent to the appointments. We had one woman then, and another has now joined her. I think we are making good progress. If plenary votes as scheduled, i.e. on Thursday, we in Parliament will have fulfilled our duty to state our opinion on time, thereby allowing a smooth changeover in the composition of the Court and ensuring that the necessary collaboration with it continues. These are the conditions which govern the procedure. But, looking to the future, there is more to it than that for Parliament. On Monday we discussed the Court of Auditors’ report for 1998. It highlighted a number of very important tasks which we must now tackle. I refer mainly to the fact that the Court states quite clearly in its report, and I can only emphasise this, that we must change the spending culture. The Court of Auditors gave some very important indicators here. Having discussed the Budget 2000 in great detail in Parliament and paved the way so that in crisis areas, such as the Balkans, there is multiannual planning of funding, we must now gear ourselves to that perspective, instead of frittering money away on small, individual programmes and projects, which are not conducive to efficient control and where more is spent on staffing than on the objectives to be achieved. What we want is to work in a target-orientated and not an expenditure-orientated manner. I therefore readily agree with the Court of Auditors: we need better financial management. Some of the Commission’s proposals as to how this should be done have now been tabled and Parliament must also give a detailed opinion on them. We can no longer afford for large swathes of the people in the European Union to say no to Europe. We must all work on this; we must listen to what the Court of Auditors has to say and include it in our appraisals so that we again hear a positive response from the people of Europe to what it is that joins us together.

Political group: PPE-DE