Mr President, this is the first time that we are to give discharge to these five agencies, and it is a new situation to which both parties must accustom themselves. The agencies must firstly be responsible to Parliament, and that entails obligations. I have had a constructive dialogue with several of the agencies. I have had good, profitable meetings with the Working Environment Agency in Bilbao, the Monitoring Centre on Racism in Vienna, the Environment Agency in Copenhagen and, in particular, the Business Education Centre in Turin. All these agencies deserve special praise for their very proactive approach. I wish to recommend that we give discharge to all the agencies concerned. We have no major, outstanding problems with the individual agencies. We do, however, have an outstanding problem with the Environment Agency which has had several contracts with firms that have also had contracts with Eurostat firms that are at the moment being investigated by the Commission’s internal auditing service for involvement in the Eurostat scandal. The internal auditing service’s final report confirms that the Environment Agency’s contracts with these firms are very worrying. The service has promised to investigate the matter more closely, and that is something we are obviously pleased about. It is generally true to say that all the agencies are in a transitional phase, and they must adjust to the new Financial Regulation. The different agencies have chosen different models, but what is common to all the agencies is that they themselves are now responsible for financial control. There will no longer be external, independent ex ante control of the agencies. That is something we in Parliament have accepted as part of the new Financial Regulation. I am, however, concerned that a gap in control will come about. The Commission’s internal auditing service has absolutely no resources for looking at the individual transactions. Mr Muis made this very clear at a meeting of the Committee on Budgetary Control. The internal auditing service has no resources at all for investigating the control procedures in the agencies. The Court of Auditors carries out very few control checks. We are therefore very dependent upon the agencies’ internal control operating properly. It will be up to the future discharge draftsmen to assess whether the system will work in practice. I want, however, right now to sound a warning. The agencies will have no controllers. An internal auditor, functioning as a consultant, is excellent now at the beginning, when the agencies are to set up new systems, but it is much better in the long term to have a controller rather than a consultant. Parliament must have more influence on the appointment of the agencies’ directors, and I am therefore pleased that we are asking the Commission to produce a proposal, something that is to be done before December of this year. That is something we approved unanimously in the committee. The agencies have had many important tasks transferred to them, so we must also ensure that they are led by competent people. I am therefore in favour of Parliament’s being consulted on the appointment of the directors. I am not perhaps as much in favour as some of my fellow MEPs of Parliament’s approving all the directors in turn, for we should then be attaching too much importance to the agencies. We do not, of course, even approve the Commissioners on a one-by-one basis, but if, for example, my esteemed fellow MEP’s, Mr Bösch’s, proposal that we should be involved in appointing them directly were to go through, I should have absolutely nothing against that. I would, however, recommend us to vote in favour of the amendment by the Group of the European Liberal, Democrat and Reform Party, proposing that Parliament be consulted but that it be the Commission that takes the decision. I am well aware that my fellow MEPs may perhaps be rather opposed to this amendment, believing that the Commission would be given too much power if it had to decide by itself, but I do in actual fact believe that it is primarily the Commission’s task to appoint its own people. We must not get involved in too many internal micromanagement decisions. We must instead devote our energies to monitoring the Commission, and that is something for which there is of course an absolute need in view of the way in which the Eurostat scandal has developed and the way in which all the Commissioners are disclaiming any form of political responsibility and are blaming the system. Basically, we should ask ourselves whether, in the end, we are good enough to control these agencies and whether we, generally speaking, have need for them all. This is an issue concerning which they have agreed to produce a cost-benefit analysis. I should, then, like to conclude by saying that the Business Development Centre in Turin has suggested that it might itself easily undertake more tasks, instead of our setting about establishing more agencies. Let us listen to what it says, and let us hope that the Commission will make a point of listening to ourselves.

Political group: GUE-NGL