Mr President, the European Coal and Steel Community is being wound down. In accordance with decisions taken earlier, it will cease in July 2002. Preparations have been made for its expiry, and in the last few years, the ECSC has not collected tax payments from companies in the coal and steel industry to finance its operations. Over the last decade, the way the ECSC has acted is reminiscent of banking. It received credits, which it distributed in the form of loans to develop the coal and steel sector. Borrowers received a sort of interest subsidy with these loans, and its importance to the development of the sector must not be overrated. The importance of the interest benefit has not been examined closely, but it is probably so little that it is fully justifiable to end the work of the ECSC. In 1999 new credits were no longer granted and the ECSC was mainly involved in the claw-back of credits, the repayment of credits it received itself, and the management of surplus funds. The Commission has been responsible for the ECSC. In recent years preparations have been under way to wind it down in July 2002. Then the ECSC will still have amounts outstanding on credits it granted, but the money it borrowed itself should have been paid off. After the repayment of credits it is estimated that the ECSC will still have more than a billion euros in surplus funds, to be transferred from its own balance sheet to the joint EU balance sheet. In accordance with decisions taken earlier on, these will form a research fund, managed by the Commission. The fund will provide support for activities related to the main ECSC areas of industry. There is probably no lack of subjects for research. In the opinion of the committee, some sort of research should be carried out on how subsidies to the coal industry in some Member States have an impact on the competition situation between different forms of energy. The most striking observation made by the Committee on Budgetary Control on the accounts for 1999 is that it was impossible to assess how efficient the Commission had been in managing ECSC funds. In any evaluation of how efficiently the ECSC has been managed, in its capacity as something akin to a bank, it is necessary to know the actual yield on cash investments and what the share of administrative costs was in attaining this figure. The information is not now available. The committee did receive from the Commission, however, an undertaking to produce this information for the year 2000, after which it will be possible to compare the market return the Commission received on investments with possible earnings received via other channels. For decades, loans have also been granted to EU personnel out of ECSC funds. When the ECSC Treaty expires these loans will be incorporated in the EU balance sheet and be managed by the Commission. After that EU staff will be in debt to the EU. It is not appropriate that the EU should act as a mortgage bank for its staff. The committee believes these loans should be transferred to banks. The committee offers this for the Commission to consider in connection with the granting of discharge. The matter will be returned to in connection with the granting of discharge in the years to come. The EU cannot be a mortgage lender for its personnel. In connection with the granting of discharge the work of the Commission will thus be assessed also from the point of view of administrative rationalisation. The minor irregularities discovered in the ECSC accounts from past years were corrected after 1999, and the committee has no special remarks to make with regard to granting discharge in the normal manner.

Political group: GUE-NGL