- Madam President, on behalf of my Group, I should like to begin by congratulating the rapporteur, Mr Wynn, for the measured and thorough report he has put forward and, as he said, the motion before the House today reflects our satisfaction and dissatisfaction in varying measures with the replies we have received from the Commission.

It is the basis for some of our deliberations in the 1995 budget and, of course, that is the part of the exercise that is important.

Behind the measured words of Mr Wynn, there are clear political messages that ring through the questions. For example, in paragraph 1 we talk of own resources. When we call upon the Commission and Council in that respect to take all possible action we are really reminding them of the obligations that arise from the Edinburgh Summit. The difference between a 1.2% and 1.21% rate of GDP in our budget may not seem much to the casual listener, but it is ECU 600 million of expenditure over which this Parliament has control.

When we talk in paragraph 2 about forecasts of agricultural expenditure, we are saying that the Commission does a lousy job of forecasting. It does such a bad job, that it reinforces the right of this Parliament to say that the distinction in the Community budget between compulsory and non-compulsory expenditure is a totally artificial one, and we should not continue in this new Parliament to allow the Commission that much unilateral control over the forecasting of 50% of the budget.

When we talk in paragraph 3 about the clearance of accounts decisions, what we are talking about are decisions by Council, Commission, and a Member State government acting in collusion, which have robbed the Community budget of over ECU 600 million which ought to have come into the budget in the clearance of accounts procedure because of the failure to operate properly milk levies in Italy.

So there are some very important questions.

When we come to the points covered in paragraph 5, Mr Wynn is the master of understatement when he said we were not happy with the response of the Commission. Well, of course, the reason we are not happy is that it did not reply to the question. It did not tell us enough for us to know whether we were happy with it or not. It is perfectly legitimate for us to insist on having information from the Commission on which Member States were underspending on fraud control measures under line B1-360 because the answer to that question will show very clearly that some of those who talk loudest and longest about the need to eradicate fraud, are the very people who do not use the European Union budgetary appropriations to pursue the objective that they profess to espouse. None more so, I may say, than the government that represents my own country.

So we see those who pay lip service to fraud, who pay lip service to the need to get value for money, not utilizing the resources that are there in order to assist the process.

There are two other points I would briefly mention on behalf of the Socialist Group. One is paragraph 20, that calls on the Commission to take all possible measures to monitor expenditure made locally in the PHARE and TACIS programmes. I am particularly concerned, as is the Committee on Budgetary Control, that we should be very, very careful that we do not extend Community financing of fraud into parts of Central and Eastern Europe in the same way that we have seen Community resources used to finance fraud inside the Community. I hope that the Commission will take very seriously the need to monitor, particularly in the PHARE and TACIS programmes, the activities of organized criminality to make sure that the resources that have been voted in our budget go to the right people.

Finally, we note the financial control seminars in paragraph 23, but we really need the Court of Auditors' report that Mr Wynn calls for. I commend the report and hope the Commission will act upon it.