Strasbourg, 10/07/2001 (Agence Europe) - The European Parliament, by adopting last week the resolution presented by the British Conservative Christopher Heaton-Harris concerning the special report by the EU Court of Auditors on the granting by the Community of interest breaks on loans granted by the European Investment Bank to small and medium-sized enterprises, criticised the way in which the European Commission managed the "Copenhagen facility" (this mechanism had been set up by the Copenhagen European Council in June 1993, in order to enhance the competitiveness of small and medium-sized enterprises through breaks on interests, whose granting would be linked to the creation of jobs). In its resolution, the Parliament feels in particular that, in terms of follow-up, the Commission does not truly undertake checks and "counts too much" on the EIB, and thus calls on the Commission to report to the authority granting the discharge, before next 15 October, in particular with regards to the measures allowing to improve the checks and the profitability of loans managed on its behalf by the EIB. The EP also invites the Council to no longer impose on the Commission and the EIB the implementation of badly formed and unmanageable programmes, and invites the Court of Auditors to expose, in its annual report for 2000, the progress achieved to remedy the weaknesses seen in the Heaton-Harris report.
In the explanatory memorandum, the rapporteur emphasises that only the Commission asserts with consistency that the project reaches its aims, emphasising that 53,789 jobs have been created. This, adds Mr Heaton-Harris, is possibly proven on the statistical level, but, when looking at the jobs effectively created, the Court of Auditors underlines that no cause-effect relationship could be established between the breaks and job creation, and the breaks were too small to truly make a difference.