Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, we need to have basic legal acts that allow the Commission to proceed according to clearly defined principles when approving and managing grants. The authorising officer, in other words, the Commission, needs such guidelines in order to comply with both the Financial Regulation and the wishes of the budgetary authority, namely Parliament. I very much regret, however, Commissioner, the time pressure we are under, for which we are not responsible. The Commission adopted this act at the end of May and we were unable to examine it earlier, and I find we are yet again in difficulties under such pressure of time. There was no need for it, because it was clear, even before the Financial Regulation was adopted, that the present grants from Part A have to be replaced by multiannual programmes and it is therefore impossible to understand why the proposal came so late. We are being made to bear the consequences of something that is not our fault. Whose fault will it be if beneficiaries do not get any subsidies early next year? The Commission will point its finger at us, the Council probably will too. But it is not our fault. We like to work carefully. This time, again, we were not able to. We really must do our best to ensure that it does not happen again, but we say that every time and I am having to say it again now. We have three reports, which Mrs Prets has already mentioned, and I agree with much of what she said. All three reports contain institutions and associations which are active as cultural ambassadors for Europe in the widest sense and which promote and foster the common cultural heritage in Europe. This House has for years supported all these organisations; it even founded some of them. Those that have been formed recently do not know that, of course, like the Youth Orchestra, the College of Europe, the University Institute in Florence, the Law Academy in Trier, the European Bureau for Lesser-Used Languages, the Mercator Network of Information and Documentation Centres, or the European Youth Forum. Up until now these organisations really have done their job of providing information and working for the integration of Europe. This also includes something that we have not created, but for whose existence I am grateful and for which you all really should be grateful: the FIME network, which has been working for European integration for 50 years in 118 houses in 32 European countries. That is why I am unable to understand what you unfortunately found it necessary to say – I assume you were forced to do so by those who today briefed you with completely incorrect information. In my opinion, we must say that the FIME is working well, that the FIME had an excellent audit early this year, that the FIME underwent an audit again three weeks ago, which consisted only in being asked to get all its files – 300 of them – to Brussels so they can be inspected there. The FIME has offered to allow everything in it to be looked at properly, as laid down in an agreement with the Commission. The result of that was that DG Press said that none of it was in order. I can only say that what they reported was not in order. We promised the FIME EUR 2.2 million in the last financial year. It got none of that money this year, nothing, simply because one of the FIME’s houses, Avignon, was guilty of a EUR 200 000 fraud. Those EUR 200 000 could easily have been deducted from the 2.4 million and then the FIME would have been able to work. If the Commission applied to itself the standards it applied to the FIME in this case, it would have been out of office long ago. (Applause) I had to say that because I am simply furious. Unfortunately, my adversary is now Mrs Reding who cannot do anything about it. She repeated what she had been given to say and I can only say that what she was given to say is not in accordance with the facts. And it can be checked by the courts. The opinion of our group on the subject of earmarking: We are in favour of earmarking. We will vote in favour of it. We are against degressivity. We will therefore also vote accordingly. I would like to say once again in connection with earmarking here that I am glad the Commission has proposed retaining earmarking. No doubt it did so because it knows that we as Members of the European Parliament are closer to the citizens than the officials sitting here in Brussels, and they know that we know what may be politically and also culturally relevant in these individual cases. The Financial Regulation cannot rate higher than a basic act or than this budgetary authority. That cannot be and I therefore believe, as our legal service has also said, that earmarking is right. I hope that together we will get it through because I believe it will bring us closer to our common desire of bringing the citizens to Europe, of really finding the soul of Europe, than will what others have proposed here. (Applause)

Political group: PPE-DE