Madam President, I should first of all like to echo the words of thanks to the members of the Committee on Budgetary Control and to Mrs Schreyer. In my view, cooperation has been excellent this year. I should also like to thank the two draftsmen of opinion of the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs and the Committee on Foreign Affairs, Human Rights, common security and defence policy, for their very pleasant and smooth cooperation. Finally, of course, I should also like to extend a word of thanks to the representatives of the decentralised bodies to whom we can grant discharge today. This discharge does in fact concern three bodies: the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions in Dublin, the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training (CEDEFOP) in Thessaloniki and the European Agency for Reconstruction in Kosovo, based in Thessalonica and Pristina. The Court of Auditors has closely examined the financial accounts of these three bodies, and in all three cases it has reached the conclusion that the annual accounts for the financial year 2000 are reliable and that the underlying transactions are legal and regular. As your rapporteur, I have been looking into what we said in the discharge report for 1999. In the first two cases, we recommended that an external evaluation be implemented and an Action Plan be submitted. As far as the Foundation in Dublin is concerned, we enquired last year whether it would not be preferable to work more closely with the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work. We asked CEDEFOP for verification of how cooperation with the European Training Foundation in Turin could be improved. Now I have to inform you that the Foundation in Dublin has faced some delays in implementing this request. The external evaluation has just been completed, the Action Plan has only recently been discussed, but the request has now been complied with, it has been presented for discussion and I, as rapporteur, will naturally remain in contact with the representatives of the Foundation in Dublin to ensure that the discharge report for 1999 is carefully observed. As far as CEDEFOP is concerned, this exercise has been fully completed and I have good news on this front. It is nice to have some good news on a discharge for a change. CEDEFOP has indeed fully complied with our request and a cooperation agreement has now also been concluded with the Foundation in Turin. In my view, it is partly thanks to the pressure exerted by our institution, the European Parliament, that considerable progress has also been made on behalf of the European taxpayer in this area. Finally, I also have positive news about the European Agency for Reconstruction in Kosovo. We must remind ourselves of what the situation was like. The challenge in Kosovo after the war was enormous. Not only due to the trail of material damage and human suffering left by the war in Kosovo, but mainly due to the damage which the Milosevic regime caused in Kosovo for more than a decade, which was typified by a chronic under-investment in resources and permanent violations of human rights. And I should like to emphatically praise our people in the field, the people of the European Agency for Reconstruction, but also the people of the Kosovo task force who went out there immediately after the war. The work they did there, sometimes under very difficult circumstances, was incredible. The Court of Auditors and everyone who reads the annual reports and the three-monthly reports can see for themselves how incredibly efficient our management has been over there. We have learnt from our mistakes in Bosnia-Herzegovina, of course, and this too is a positive message. I was your rapporteur for a special Court of Auditors report about the actions taken by the EU in Bosnia-Herzegovina. We made mistakes there, we learnt from these, and this is how we managed to take effective action in Kosovo. I should like to finish off with a remark about the situation in Kosovo. The energy sector is the most important area in which we are investing, yet it is also typified by an inherent paradox. An incredible amount of money is being poured into the supply of energy, and yet electricity failures occur almost on a daily basis. This is a paradox for the population, and in my report, I urge for more efforts to be made in order to make it clear to the people in Kosovo that energy-saving measures will need to be stepped up, and that energy will also need to be paid for in order to achieve a more sustainable policy. Finally, I have received reports about misappropriations at the Kosovo Electricity company, but it is too early to draw any conclusions. I have asked UNMIK to draft a report on this, as it is UNMIK that is ultimately responsible, and I think that we will have to incorporate the results of this report in our discharge report for 2001.

Political group: Verts-ALE