Mr President, please allow me to highlight a few points as rapporteur of the 1999 budget. Firstly the 1999 budget was defined at the time as a “bridge” towards the new financial requirements, that is towards the financing of Agenda 2000. Secondly, it was also a bridge with regard to the political priorities which this Parliament wanted to establish with a view to the future, with a view to the new millennium, especially in category 4 – external activities – where the European Parliament made an effort to increase the commitment appropriations. And finally, the European Parliament also increased the payment appropriations in the 1999 budget in view of the clear shortfall of one billion in payment appropriations, a shortfall which had appeared, above all, in the Social Funds. Now, Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, we find ourselves with four supplementary and amending budgets (SABs), with 41 transferrals and a fifth amending budget. This is a record. It is also a record that we have taken less than 150 hours to arrive at the first and only reading of this SAB 4. On the one hand, we have amending budget no. 1. This does not cause any problem, it is a normal procedure, it is the surplus of the 1998 budget which, normally, is returned to the Member States. But it deserves to be taken into account when we speak of the other amending budgets. As for SAB 3, I will leave it to my colleague, Mr Fabra Vallés, to go into more detail. I will turn directly to SAB 4, which proposes 137 million in commitment appropriations for the creation of an Agency for the Reconstruction of Kosovo, for macro-financial aid for the former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia and 30 million in humanitarian aid for Turkey as a result of the earthquake. And, in payment appropriations, aid of 180 million for PHARE, the former Yugoslavia and Kosovo. And, apart from that, 15 posts for OLAF. Mr President, once we have looked at the fact that all the contents of SAB 4 were to be reallocated within category 4, in view of the fact that Parliament and the Council have decided to finance these within title B-1 Agriculture, I will change the subject a little because my problem is not with the SABs. My problem is not the urgency, and is not the fact that we have to provide aid through finance which was not anticipated. I have another pressing problem, Mr President. It is that when I read page 12 of the Spanish version of the preliminary draft supplementary and amending budget no. 4/99, I realise that we are only dealing with the tip of the iceberg. Because here the Commission tells us literally that, despite the fact that we have made this financing effort through reallocation, a further sum of 570.5 million is required, which the Commission intends to reallocate in the global transferral or in a supplementary transferral during this financial year. The Commission also recognises that the reallocation of this sum is not yet possible in category 4, but says that an extensive effort should be made to make a reallocation within the budget as a whole. Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, this terrifies me, because at the end of the financial year of the 1999 budget – to refer to a Spanish proverb – “not even the rapporteur is going to recognise her own budget”. With so many reallocations, the most serious matter is the fact that the European Parliament’s own priorities, voted for in December, no longer exist. They have been totally changed because the budgetary authority of Parliament has been undermined by this continuous reallocation. I warn you of this, Mr President, in consideration of the 2000 budget. On pages 8 and 12, there is an equally terrifying problem: we have increased the payment appropriations. In this case, the Commission says that even so it is calculated that we are still missing 650.5 million in payment appropriations. Add to this the fact that an SEM 2000 forecast says that the possible shortfall in payment appropriations for the Structural Funds in 1999 is going to be even greater than in 1997 and 1998. Mr President, this “burden of the future” which you talked about years ago in the Committee on Budgets, is now the burden of the present, because I believe that we have ignored your “warning” and we have not been sufficiently strong as a Parliament to prevent this false saving on the part of the Council, which presents a payment budget while carefully forgetting that the commitments have to be fulfilled. This is the plea I would make with regard to the 2000 budget: we must not carry on like this. As rapporteur for the 1999 budget, the 2000 budget must – as I see it – anticipate a review of the Financial Perspective. It has been announced and the figures are there. It must include a considerable increase in payment appropriations, not only to prevent the burden from becoming even heavier, but also to prevent the paralysing of payments in the Community’s programmes. I hope that the 1999 budget will serve at least to prevent these mistakes in the future.

Political group: PSE