Mr President, in December 2001 the Commission adopted its Green Paper on the criminal-law protection of the financial interests of the Community and the establishment of a European Prosecutor. This provoked a broad debate among academics and practitioners beyond legal circles. That was also its intention and I would like to thank the Commission for it. The European Parliament, too, got involved in the debate. Even before the Green Paper appeared, it called in several resolutions for better protection for EU finances through the establishment of a European prosecutor for financial matters, who would deal with the growing number of cases of cross-border crime affecting the EU budget. The time is ripe. The EU is on the threshold of enlargement, with ten new Member States acceding in the coming year. The Community budget will continue to grow, administration of European money will become even more complex. At the same time, cross-border crime will increase as modern technology makes it increasingly professional. The territorial fragmentation of criminal law systems and the difficulties in judicial cooperation between Member States are the reason why criminals are seldom caught and even more seldom convicted. The statistics show that the EU budget loses as much as EUR 1 000 million every year to internationally active organised criminals. It is possible that this money funds other criminal structures. Cigarette smuggling is the best example. European taxpayers’ money is lost for actual EU purposes. I repeat: lost, since even today we in Europe still do not have efficient structures for the prosecution of EU financial crime. The Council has recognised the danger in so far as it anchored the protection of financial interests in the first pillar of the Treaty of Maastricht and enshrined cooperation with the Commission in the Treaty of Amsterdam. With today’s report from the Committee on Budgetary Control, Parliament joins the 72 opinions that the Commission has so far received from various quarters and considered concerning the Green Paper. Please note that our report is an own-initiative report, not a legislative one. We on the committee have taken time to make a thorough analysis of the subject of ‘establishing a European Prosecutor’; we commissioned experts to make external studies and arranged a hearing with the national parliaments and representatives of civil society. In this report, we are now putting forward options and calling on the Commission to make improvements, especially with regard to safeguarding basic rights and rights of defence, supervision of the European Public Prosecutor and his links with existing structures. We want links with the existing structures of OLAF, Eurojust and Europol. We want in that way to avoid duplication, but at the same time we want the Prosecutor to be an efficient instrument for the protection of EU finances at European level. There are clear proposals as to how the future European Prosecutor could cooperate with the national authorities in the Member States. The principle of subsidiarity is the maxim here. All the questions of how the Public Prosecutor’s Office should operate can then be settled by secondary law. I would like to sincerely thank my colleagues from my committee, and also those from the Committees on Constitutional Affairs, Legal and Home Affairs and Petitions for their positive and constructive cooperation. Their proposals have been incorporated into this report. Our main concern is that an appropriate legal basis for the creation of this Public Prosecutor’s Office should be laid down in the Treaty and that the Council should appoint this new organ with the assent of Parliament. The revision of the treaties remains an essential prerequisite for this, because only a treaty reform can legitimise the proposal. We call on the European Convention to provide for this legal basis for the establishment of a European Public Prosecutor to protect the EU’s financial interests now so that it can be placed on the agenda for the 2004 intergovernmental conference. As I said, the time is ripe. We want the means to be created in the European Union and for the European Union to strengthen and secure the protection of the Community’s financial interests before enlargement takes place. We all want an area of freedom, security and justice, where a stop is put to fraud and corruption at the expense of the EU budget and therefore of the European taxpayer. (Applause)

Political group: PPE-DE