Mr President, this is an important and urgent matter, and Parliament is complying with a request from the Commission to come to a decision quickly, because today, you must realise, men and women are dying in Kosovo quite simply because the temperature is 25 degrees below zero, these people are doing a great deal of work to ensure a minimum of maintenance and they have not been paid. An urgent request has been referred to us, and we approve it. We have been asked for EUR 35 million. We agree that it may be granted and we call on the Commission to be extremely vigilant in ensuring, once the decision has been taken, that the amounts are set aside and paid as quickly as possible. We are talking about macrofinancial aid. There are reactions to this in some quarters since it does not comply with the liberal canons of beauty which stipulate that there must be no financial intervention in order support an administration. This is not our opinion. Our opinion is that it is vital to contribute to setting up an administration in Kosovo and that it is by no means absurd to contribute directly to the payment of public employees in this region. Indeed that is something extremely useful that we could have done in Russia throughout the 1990s to prevent the disintegration of that state. The second important problem is that we have been asked for payments, the donors have made commitments and, obviously, we are the only ones actually paying. The other parties are not paying. We wish to see an end to this one-sided situation regarding requests for financial aid. We would like the Commission to make commitments on the amendments we are proposing in regard to this. We would like to link the granting of all aid to the availability of the amounts due from the other donors. This is not in order to limit or be stingy with our financial contribution to Kosovo but, quite the contrary, to ensure that our contribution is being matched by the contributions of other donors. From that point of view, the proposed facility is a two-phase aid facility and the second tranche must be released as soon as the donors have made clear their interest. Finally, we have three questions for the Commission in this regard. Firstly, we need the Commission to give us, on a regular basis, the list and the amounts that other donors contribute. When we come to pay, we want to know what the others are paying. Secondly, we wish to see an exact progress report on the invitations to tender and the schedule for their implementation. During the budgetary procedure we were told that the funds for Kosovo must be voted on as a matter of urgency yet, according to our information, no invitation to tender has been published or initiated to date. This is serious, since it holds up the whole process of reconstruction in Kosovo. Finally, and this follows on from what I have just said, we would like the Commission to inform the Committee on Budgets on a very regular basis, monthly, regarding progress on payments made. We have Commission documents which speak of firm commitments. It is not firm commitments that we need, just plain commitments would suffice, and we need to know what has actually been paid and, more especially, what has not been paid. Kosovo has suffered far too much from delays in payment.

Political group: PPE-DE