Mr President, I applaud the development of the rapporteur's ideas in recent years on this subject. I enjoyed working with him in the Committee on Development and Cooperation on this report. There is no single holistic approach to the management of public utilities that fits all developing countries. Evidence from post-independent developing countries in the past 50 years shows that state-owned enterprises have, in the majority of cases, failed to efficiently and cost-effectively provide water, waste management, municipal services, road transport, aviation services, mining, reforestation and energy supplies, thereby making them a considerable burden on the state budget, hindering economic growth and impoverishing the poorest. Poverty, diseases and lost economic opportunities have increased because of the state management of public utilities by bureaucrats whose first priority is job security and not economic efficiency: just look at the failed Soviet system. It is imperative to get the private sector involved in the provision of public services in developing countries in order to increase cost efficiency as well as economic growth. The private sector alone can generate sustainable employment and is the driving force of every modern economy. Public utilities in developing countries should be privatised through open international procedures that are transparent, quick and not onerous, and able to meet sustainable development and public interest criteria. Ideally, the award of a tender should be the sole task of an independent, foreign financial institution, acting alone, according to international norms and reporting conditions, and one that has no conflict of interest in that country or in that project. I have studied this process for many years and have sadly come to a very sad and bitter conclusion: many foreign direct investors are put off by tedious and laborious tender procedures, consultants' reports, evaluation committees and committees to evaluate other evaluations – devices constructed by officials of developing countries and consultants to international bodies to earn money either through fees or corruption. These procedures are an open door to the impoverishment of countries through delay, vacillation and corruption. The more decision-makers there are in the loop, the more corruption there is. Such corruption takes various forms. The first form is that of accelerating a decision and overlooking a better bid by making payments to high government officials, such as are to be found in East Asian countries. The other form of less detectable corruption to be found in South Asian countries and Africa is making payments to block the success of another more favourable bid by a competitor. In the former case, despite the corruption and the more inferior services now provided, the job gets done and some form of utility is provided, while in the latter nothing ever gets done and the economy suffers. The former is endemic in the North and East Asian countries, while the latter is epidemic in South Asia and Africa. When large transnational companies are encouraged to invest, through foreign direct investment, in developing countries, they should also be empowered to make offset investments. By offset investments I mean that they should be able to put a part of that investment into social capacity-building, into schools, hospitals, training colleges and youth centres, so that there is a public element in the privatisation of a public utility whereby everybody around the utility benefits. This is the way forward, with transparency and openness.

Political group: PPE-DE