Mr President, now that the rapporteurs have driven a few things home to the Commission, I would like to concentrate on the political aspects of the discharge procedure. People in this House clearly have different yardsticks for the discharge procedure and different political uses for it. Our yardstick is that wherever clear commitments have been given to remedy acknowledged shortcomings, and where there has been no serious misconduct, discharge will be given. So far as I am aware, it is also true that in order to get those commitments the rapporteurs have made a great number of offers that could not be refused. I think that is a sensible way of proceeding. For us there are therefore always two options when we enter a discharge procedure. In the language of the Rules of Procedure both the option of postponing discharge and the option of granting discharge. But I think we also have to make clear that our experience after four years is that parts of this House – and I mean by that the self-appointed Euro-sceptics – have always tried to reduce the discharge process to one option, namely to collect as many votes as possible to take a shot at the Commission in the hope that perhaps one day it will fall over. I do not think that is what we understand by ‘taking into account’. There are always both options and not just one. Take the example of the accounting system. We have always started from the assumption that the Court of Auditors has found there to be deficiencies that have to be made good. We have called for further evidence for claims that go further than that, claims that are spread with particular ‘verve’ in one country or another in publications which, surprisingly for me, they still call newspapers, but such evidence has never been produced. It is important to note that. As general rapporteur, Mr Casaca set clear conditions. These were broadly agreed with the representatives of the various groups and were accepted by the Commission. We were very pleased to hear that again from Mrs Schreyer today and we are therefore in favour of discharge. We have seen that systematic attempts were made in 2002 to link a staff dispute that arose in the Commission with the smell of a cover-up of possible fraud in the accounting system. On its own, that staff dispute would not have created much of a stir in the press. But I say once again: the attempt to link it failed. No evidence was ever produced for such a link and in the end there was only the staff dispute. But a staff dispute is no reason for refusing discharge in a system where such discharge procedures exist. On the contrary, the more hysterical the attempt to make more of the staff dispute became, the clearer it became even to some journalists that there was nothing more to the story. Members of this House in particular then noticed that when, a week before the vote in committee, a newspaper suddenly describes as brand new a document that was distributed here in the House months before, basically an attempt is being made to orchestrate them. At this point we can in my opinion say that we were right not to do that and we have shown that the self-appointed Euro-sceptics can be reduced to their hard core if they put their real agenda to the vote. (Applause)

Political group: PSE