Mr President, Commissioner, the main subject in the 1999 annual report on OLAF is, of course, the dismantling of the criminal organisation responsible for adulterating butter and fraudulently obtaining public funds, an organisation based in Naples but with influence at the heart of Europe. In addition to congratulating the rapporteur on his excellent report, I think that a special compliment is certainly due not just to OLAF but also to the Italian and French judicial organisations whose joint work led to this organised crime network being broken up. According to the latest information available, the scheme for adulterating butter set up by a number of Camorra families in Naples produced 130 000 tonnes of totally or partially artificial butter. I think that makes this the biggest fraud ever committed against the EU's common agricultural policy. The first question that comes to mind here is how it is possible that a policy that is supposed to help rural communities and farmers can end up systematically financing major agro-industrial complexes, and that those complexes frequently turn out to be no more scrupulous in respecting the Community budget than they are towards consumers and the farmers in whose name they are financed. The second question that needs asking here is how it is possible for a fraud on this scale, which was meticulously planned and put into operation over three years, and involving astronomical Community subsidies, to go undetected, and for the Commission to have been incapable of detecting anything at all. After the persistent revelations of fraud concerning the use of subsidised powdered milk for feeding calves, of bogus butter exports and revelations regarding adulterated dairy products, the Commission still seems unwilling, despite this huge scandal, to carry out a thorough review of its entire system of intervention in dairy products. The pan-European nature of this fraud, which involved major dairy product companies in countries such as Belgium, France, Italy and Germany, means that it is unacceptable for the policies needed to combat food adulteration to be permanently left in the hands of the Member States. This also makes it more urgent for the Commission to adopt direct measures to combat the adulteration of products such as olive oil, wine and dairy produce. The Commission has refused to divulge names, to arrange special surveillance or to take preventive measures against the innumerable dairy product companies involved, on the grounds of legal confidentiality and the presumption of innocence. However, I am bound to say that the Commission's discretion in this case is very much in contrast with the way it dealt with the widow of an adviser to an ex-Commissioner. It is demanding that she should now pay back 18 months of her late husband's salary. If there are dairy product companies that are incapable of distinguishing tens of thousands of tonnes of concoctions made from animal waste, oil and chemical products from real butter, how can consumers be expected to have any confidence in their ability to guarantee the quality of their own products? What is also at stake here is whether we are all equal in the eyes of the Commission, or whether when it comes to major companies and big interests, some are evidently more equal than others.

Political group: PSE