Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, 1999 was a year of great progress in fighting fraud. After the old Commission resigned, it was only a few weeks before agreement was reached on the legal texts establishing the new European Anti-Fraud Office, OLAF. Parliament, the Council and the Commission had to and were therefore able to demonstrate that the EU was capable of taking action in the fight against fraud, corruption and mismanagement. Full implementation of what was agreed over two years ago has, however, proved to be somewhat more difficult than originally assumed. The first annual report by the OLAF Supervisory Committee accordingly quite rightly sounded the alarm. Although the new Director, Mr Brüner, has been in his post for over a year now, he has so far not been able to put together a new management team for OLAF, and this is chiefly because the Commission has involved him in an administrative trench war over the procedures for recruiting the new management. Of course, one of the questions here is the independence of OLAF and its Director. The Commission's position on this is inconsistent. When it comes to appointing new members of the management team, the Commission wants to precisely supervise and be involved in every single step. But when it comes to taking back staff that do not meet the new job specification for OLAF, then the Commission behaves as if this were not its concern at all. And yet it was the Commission that simply transferred the entire staff of the previous UCLAF task force to OLAF en bloc, thus creating the majority of the problems which the Director of OLAF is now having to tackle. Mrs Schreyer, this transfer took place despite explicit warnings from this House. Parliament then slammed on the emergency brakes and held back the additional posts earmarked for the current year. It is now the responsibility of the Commission to eliminate the obstacles I have described. It only makes sense to remove the present reserve if this condition is met. Mrs Schreyer, you personally and the Commission as a whole have come to the conclusion that without a European Public Prosecutor the fight against fraud will remain a half measure. The detection and clearing-up of fraud and other offences adversely affecting the Union's interests must be followed by prosecution and punishment. We will really have egg on our face if it turns out in one or two years' time that what I hope will be a very efficiently operating Anti-Fraud Office has exposed significantly more cases of fraud and irregularities than in the past, but that there is a problem with punishing those responsible. It is significant that the Commission's annual report is full of statistics, but it does not contain any information on the number of people actually convicted following cases of fraud. I am sure that if this statistic were available it would tell a sorry tale. However, these people will not be punished unless there is a prosecutor representing the interests of Europe's taxpayers, and that applies above all to the institutions of the European Union itself. And they can only be credible if it is visibly demonstrated that the much-vaunted zero-tolerance policy is more than just empty words and is being put into practice. This requires a public prosecutor, and, as Parliament has already demanded on various occasions, one that is exclusively responsible for the Union's institutions. This was proposed by the five independent experts in their second report on the reform of the Commission in September 1999. Furthermore, the OLAF Supervisory Committee has since then on several occasions, and in the clearest possible terms, called for what might be called for the appointment of an internal public prosecutor. For the avoidance of all doubt, let me say that a public prosecutor of this kind could not, as the law currently stands, himself appear as a prosecutor in the national courts; his role would be to support and advise the relevant national public prosecutor's offices. It would also be his job to supervise OLAF's internal investigations within the institutions, and he would thus work in partnership with the Director of OLAF. The Director of OLAF currently has to make contact with the Secretaries-General of the institutions if OLAF wishes to carry out internal investigations, and it is therefore easy to suggest that his investigations are not truly independent. This problem would to a large extent be solved if there were a public prosecutor for internal matters. There would be no automatic extension of such a public prosecutor's powers beyond the Union's institutions. That would require an amendment to the Treaties. Such an amendment failed in Nice because of opposition from several Member States. However, the Commission cannot just sit back and do nothing, now of all times. It must now demonstrate that it really is serious about fighting fraud and is doing everything possible, displaying originality and political courage, on the basis of the current Article 280. One thing must be made clear, however: discussion papers, green papers and white papers are not enough. There are plenty of those already. What is needed now is a concrete proposal for a regulation to be adopted by the Council and Parliament under the codecision procedure. In other words, the Commission must exercise its right of initiative. We need another great leap forward.

Political group: PSE