Mr President, I shall endeavour to act on your good advice. The supplementary and amending budget presented here should not pose any major problems for the simple reason that, if adopted – and it is good to see that Parliament has an opportunity to introduce several elements and budgetary choices that suit it and are to its liking, generally speaking, it is a draft that the Council will consider positive as well. In fact, as far as this draft budget is concerned, the Council is the outright winner and legitimately so; not by scoring a victory against us, rather it is a winner all round. This is because this budget is essentially designed to enable the Council to recover the surplus balances from last year, which amount to EUR 3.2 billion. It includes a lower contribution in terms of the British rebate and a greater yield in own resources, for example customs duties, all of which is deducted from the costs it has to bear. The draft presented here can therefore be considered positively by both the Council and Parliament. This is firstly because during the trialogue, we all agreed that the budget presented should not be limited to merely returning the balances to the Member States, but should also include expenditure and constitute a genuine supplementary and amending budget. For Parliament this represents a limited victory but a significant one nonetheless. In the second place, we have made several decisions that can be viewed in a positive light. First, we have introduced a special contribution for orphan drugs of up to EUR 1 million. Thanks to the legal basis that now exists we are able to fund these orphan drugs. This is considered a priority by the committee responsible, the Committee on Budgets and Parliament itself. Second – and this is the second major contribution to the issue – we have introduced extra resources, which total some EUR 11 million. Five million are to go to the High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and six million to the United Nations interim mission in Kosovo to fund the interim civil administrations. Once again, the legal bases exist to make these possible. We have the resources, the needs are there, Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina are top priorities and we have chosen to finance them, but the question is how. This is to be achieved using commitment appropriations from the ECIP appropriations that no longer serve a purpose and, though they exist as appropriations, the absence of legal basis means that they cannot be used. It is therefore expenditure that has been secured by a sacrifice that barely costs us anything. The third significant element relates to the financing of the special aid for Montenegro. You will be aware that we were all against this aid being financed with resources from other foreign programmes, in particular the MEDA programme. We therefore decided to fund it using the margin which totals 21 million in this heading. We need 20 million. Budgetary history works in our favour in this case and by using almost this entire margin, this initiative can be financed without any reduction or transfer from other appropriations, which is highly satisfactory. Now – and I shall end on this point – the main question that remains to be answered is whether or not the Council will support us from a procedural point of view. We have had a first reading in the Council, this is our first reading, and we should very much like to conclude matters on the basis of this first reading. In other words, we hope that the Council’s second reading that takes place on 20 July will take up our first reading, if not we shall have to proceed to a second reading. I do not believe that it would be in the Council’s interest – and it is a pity that they are not present this evening – to do this. What is more, I should like to stress another important point in that if we proceed to a second reading, in order to adhere to the strict timetables set, we should have to attend a session in August in order to vote on this SAB at second reading, which is obviously out of the question. It has always been the rule in Parliament and the other institutions that August is excluded from the timetables set. I am sure that the Council will adhere to that rule as it is in their interests, our interests and both of our interests to agree on both the procedure to adopt as well as the substance of the budget.

Political group: PPE-DE