Mr President, on behalf of my colleagues, and especially my Italian ones, in the Confederal Group of the , I should like to express our deepest sympathy with the badly hit Italian and Iraqi families. We absolutely deplore the dreadful acts carried out by the terrorist groups, and we condemn them most vigorously. I should like to use the Group’s speaking time to talk about Eurostat, and I should like to make it quite clear that my group is not out to have the Prodi Commission dismissed because of Eurostat. On the contrary, we should like to bring this matter to a close and give the Commission peace to do its work in its last year. The Commission has a very ambitious work programme for 2004 with enlargement and the creation of stability and growth, not only in the EU but also in the rest of the world. Unfortunately, the Eurostat scandal will hang like a cloud over the Commission until political responsibility for it has been assigned, so we should like to call upon Mr Prodi to dismiss the Commissioner responsible for Eurostat so that the Commission can be given peace to do its work. We have now obtained the final report on Eurostat from the Internal Audit Service. It unfortunately confirms what we have known for a long time, namely that the administration of Eurostat has been scandalous. It has, however, been very difficult for the Internal Audit Service to establish what really went on in Eurostat. There are no files, and most documents are missing. It is therefore impossible to say very much about practice after 1999, but we know that the unlawful accounts were open right until the summer of last year and this year. We know there is a strong likelihood of a considerable amount of money having gone into the wrong pockets. We know that there is still no database of contracts. We know that the audits have not been followed up. We know that almost nothing has been done to tidy matters up. We know, in other words, that Eurostat’s administration has been scandalous, including after 1999. Is anyone taking responsibility, however? No, apparently not. The Santer Commission fell just under five years ago. It did so because the Group of Wise Men concluded that it was very difficult to find anyone in the Commission who was willing to take responsibility. Following a host of reforms, we had in actual fact hoped that those times were over, but we have unfortunately been back in rather familiar territory in recent days. After the fall of the Santer Commission, we have now obtained a new article in the Treaty. It has now become possible for the Commission President to dismiss individual Commissioners. That is something Mr Prodi has chosen not to do, given that the person responsible, Mr Solbes, knew nothing. Mr Prodi has, however, conceded that Mr Solbes became guilty through having taken no action. That is, in my view and that of my group, reason enough. Passivity and indifference are also a form of crime, and one for which responsibility must be taken. Mr Prodi has today presented his action plan for Eurostat. I am obliged to say this very clearly: my group is sick to death of action plans. We want to see results. We have seen a host of action plans and plans for reform over the last four years. It is, of course, excellent to have plans for new and better procedures, and we shall naturally give our backing to such procedures. That is just not enough, however. The culture must be changed. It will be so only if the President sends a clear signal to his employees. Irregularities and fraud have consequences. We do in fact remember some wise words from Mr Prodi: zero tolerance for fraud. Fine words, but patently of no consequence. Less than a short hour ago, I issued a piece of advice in the Committee on Budgetary Control. It was that another Commissioner should be found to take over Eurostat in the last year, with Mr Solbes otherwise retaining his areas of responsibility. He gets bottom marks for his administration of Eurostat, however. With his passivity, he has been a party to maintaining a culture of systematic disarray and irregularities. He can, in other words, no longer have responsibility for Eurostat, and I now really do hope that the promise of consequences and of zero tolerance for fraud will be fulfilled and someone else found to take care of Eurostat.

Political group: GUE-NGL