Mr President, thank you in any case for giving me the floor. I should like to start on a positive note. The Court of Auditors is celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary, for which congratulations are in order, and I can only say that in those twenty-five years, the Court of Auditors has become a father figure without which this Parliament would be unable to do its job. I am also pleased that the Court of Auditors notes that the Commission is functioning ever more effectively. The Court of Auditors takes a positive view of Commission reform, and the same more or less goes for the new Financial Regulation. This is the good news. The bad news is that a positive Statement of Assurance has not yet been issued this year either. I should like to repeat what I said last year and the year before. Why can the Commission not be more specific and set a date by which we must have a positive Statement of Assurance? It would be something we could all work towards and we would know what to expect. It is also disappointing to perceive no real improvement in European unification’s oldest policy area, namely that of agricultural policy. Once again, the Court of Auditors is assessing agricultural spending very critically, and there appears to me to be hardly any tangible improvement. This is why I took the initiative earlier this year to better control agricultural spending. This topic will be discussed shortly in this House, and I hope that the Commission, the Council, as well as the MEPs will assess it in a positive light. It is also this year for the first time that the Directors-General of the Commission will be required to account for healthy financial management. I think that this will be essential in the future. As far as the procedure is concerned, surely there is room for at least some improvement, and the reports will also need to be more specific and clearer, but I think that this will be also an essential point for us as Parliament in future. As everything that needed to be said about the surplus on the budget has already been said, I will not enter into any great detail on this subject. Suffice to say that we naturally need to budget more effectively. I would also like to say a few words about the Statement of Assurance itself. This is the same message I am having to repeat. I gather from the Court of Auditors and the Commission that it is very difficult to indicate margins of error in some sections of the Budget, but I would still appreciate it if the Court of Auditors were to develop certain indicators where possible. We should be able to judge, from one year to the next, whether things have generally improved by a certain percentage. Everyone likes to know the final score, and this should also be possible for the European Budget. One major point that is left is enlargement. The Court of Auditors itself admits that even the current Member States leave a great deal to be desired on this score. As far as I am aware, the IACS (integrated administration and control system) has not yet become operational in any of the new Member States. This is a point of grave concern and something which will require attention particularly in future.

Political group: ELDR