Mr President, I welcome the two Commissioners who are most involved in the development of the budget, and I have no doubt that President Prodi will be present at the debate that will take place in two months time. Beginning with the most important discharge, the discharge of the Commission’s accounts – in political terms, the most relevant and, in terms of quantity, the most significant – we are aware that your responsibility in terms of expenses is limited and that a majority of the responsibility in the field of expenses lies with the Member States. It is important that you try to become, firstly, an example for the Member States to follow and that, therefore, you understand that we demand more of you, if possible; and one day we will have to start to talk very seriously about these cases which are always detected in the Council rather than in the Commission. Furthermore I would like you to look at Mrs Stauner’s report from the most positive point of view possible. All the groups have reached an agreement to raise 17 questions in relation to certain cases. They are not the only ones. We could have mentioned other problems arising from the TACIS or PHARE programmes. After the crisis of the previous Commission, which you have begun to deal with, what we want – because we believe in your intentions and we want a strong and independent Commission and we are therefore giving you time – is for you to give us a positive response to certain very specific cases. I can assure you that you will be able to reply in the affirmative to each of the cases which we are putting to you. Therefore, between now and the summer, we could hold a sitting for the purposes of discharging the accounts. Not only are we as interested as you in the discharge of the accounts, but in fact we are more so. I would therefore like you to study the report which has been presented by Mrs Stauner with the broad consensus of the Groups. This is a political debate, and you must understand that we need you to act. Documents must not disappear. You must do something, irrespective of the fact that I want us to reach an agreement soon on the way we will have to deal with the documents you call confidential. As rapporteur for the 1999 Commission budget, I would love to be able to do my work in the clear knowledge of which documents we have access to and which we do not and why. I will give you an additional piece of information. This debate must not concentrate excessively on the accounting issues. As you can see in this budget, this is a political debate which goes beyond a strict examination of what you have done with regard to the 1998 budget. It is a general debate. We will also have to reach a framework agreement on how we can include in this debate – which is becoming increasingly important – not only accounting issues but also issues from other years relating to expenditure or management. You know that an unknown amount of money is lost through fraud or misappropriation. You are facing a great challenge, because even more resources are lost through a lack of motivation, that virus which has infected the entire administration of the Commission and which you must eradicate. More resources are lost through lack of motivation than through misappropriation. This is a quality issue which will also have to be increasingly discussed in the context of this debate. I will refer finally to the European Parliament’s budget, and I would like to reply to those people who say that, since we are supposedly tough and demanding with you, we must also be so with regard to our own institution. Of course we must. However we must not compare separate issues. For example, the auditor has not detected any irregularity in Parliament’s budget. We must therefore be prudent and fair and try to treat everyone as they deserve. The same must be demanded of Parliament as of all the others, but this is our House, we have more information and we can therefore take a different approach when it comes to proposing, as the Kuhne report does, a conditional discharge and not a postponement of the discharge. I will end by saying that you can reply to the 17 questions we have raised. We want you to do so, and we understand that in that way we can support you so that you, who have just joined this Commission, can really control your house. ‘Take the bull by the horns’ – as we say in Spain – and we will be able to achieve a discharge for this year on the part of the majority of the Groups in this House before the summer.

Political group: PPE-DE