Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, first of all, I would like to congratulate Mr Bösch on the report and express my appreciation of the firm stance he took towards those directly and politically responsible for the fraud who have been charged. A plea to Commissioner Schreyer: I urge you not to try to play down the Eurostat case which remains one of the most alarming and awkward episodes that the European Parliament has ever faced. The enormous economic damage caused has not and may never be quantified. Let us move onto the report. If what Mr Bösch wrote in the report were to be implemented, then we would live very peacefully in Europe. Financial interests would hardly be protected; legality would be the key element in all European issues. If, however, the established principles, which are summarised in Recital G, which state, and I quote, that ‘the Commission committed itself to a ‘zero tolerance’ policy with regard to fraud and irregularities’, are not translated in practice, then everything that is written will not make the immense effort poured by the rapporteur into his report worthwhile and no specific objective will be achieved. Now, given what has come to light on Eurostat, would it not have been more appropriate to put an amendment tabled by myself to the vote in committee – although, I am glad to say, Mr Bösch explained this issue – which reads, and I quote: ‘Can only condemn all the cases in which OLAF has been unable to conclude its investigations within the allotted 9-month time limit, in particular the Eurostat case, which has been suspended for over three years and in respect of which a timely investigation could have broken a chain of events which has now been exposed as anything but straightforward and of which certain elements are under investigation by the judicial authorities’? This amendment will be put to the vote and, I hope, adopted tomorrow in this Chamber. At the same time I do not want what I have said about OLAF to be misinterpreted, for it cannot become a scapegoat for fraud perpetrated by others. This is why OLAF must be able to continue to receive its funding, which must be sufficient to strengthen the staff, in particular the investigation officials. I completely agree with the rapporteur in Article 33(1), when he calls on OLAF to inform the European Parliament in detail if an investigation takes longer than the prescribed nine months. Coming back to the Eurostat case, which disturbs and irritates many of us, I feel I can say that I certainly agree that our positions should be cautious, but, at the same time, we cannot accept an arrangement, which would mean that it would be seen as counterproductive to place the European Institutions in jeopardy over this case. We should be discussing and debating something else: in the Eurostat affair, were the contracts concluded properly or did fraud come to light? If, as would seem the case from reading the reports, many contracts were concluded without lawful signatories, if there were conflicts of interest that led to certain, illegal economic benefits, if documents were systematically lost that should have been subject to control and news published outside that was intended solely to facilitate negotiations, if more than 50% of contracts were concluded with a single bid, then, clearly, damage running into millions of euro has been done to the European Community and this aspect must override everything else, including the preservation of the European institutions.

Political group: PPE-DE