Mr President, I would like to start by protesting at the fact that this debate is being held at night. It is shameful that we have to debate this and other important matters at night. It is shameful. And no one can understand it, including myself. Mrs Theato has come to this night sitting despite being ill and I have left a dinner with the representatives of '¡Basta Ya!', winners of this year’s Sajarov Prize. This situation has to change. Next I would like to congratulate the rapporteur on her report, which is so important and, contrary to what has been said, so necessary. Moreover, I think that her report is part of our new way of understanding what should be politically correct in the institutions, and that is transparency. In this morning’s debate on the European Council in Nice we criticised the fact that the meetings were held at night and behind closed doors. It would be good to know what goes on there and perhaps, if the doors were open, the Member States would behave differently. That is precisely the major contribution made by the Morgan report. Its aim is that in this whole process there should be transparency, that we should not beat about the bush, that fingers should be pointed and that it should be made clear that the services are doing things badly. For example, I would like to criticise the fact that, when the report of the Court of Auditors was presented, the Council was absent, as if it is not interested in this Parliament. I also think that it is worthy of criticism that the Council is not present at the meetings of the Committee on Budgetary Control, which is precisely where the faults that arise in 80% of the budget, which the Council spends, are discussed. One day we will have to change this sort of absence of the ‘innocent hand’ of the Council, which is never guilty of anything. Mrs Schreyer, you have just mentioned the Council, saying that there was a Member State that opposed the creation of a European Prosecutor. It is time for the politically correct thing to be to say which Member State it is and to give its full name. This also happens in many reports. This very morning, for example, in the debate that we had in the Committee on Budgetary Control, we saw how the representative of the Commission, when we asked him to indicate the Member States that do things badly, answered: “Look, the monitoring of what the Member States do is done through sampling, and there is no reason to penalise the Member States whose irregularities have been revealed through sampling.” Well I do not care. They should say that, according to the sample, such and such a Member State is not doing things right. I would like to finish by saying that it is important for there to be monitoring of the approval of the accounts, and for me this is the most important thing, that is, that there is reason for amendment not only by the Commission but also by the Council. It is also important to include observations in the reports on the Member States about how they comply with or fail to comply with the conclusions on the approval of the accounts. I would like the Member States, at least the Presidency and the representatives of the Member States being discussed, to be present for debates in Plenary, and also in committee.

Political group: PPE-DE