Brussels, 08/04/2002 (Agence Europe) - On Wednesday, the Committee of Member States' Permanent Representatives to the EU (Coreper) will be discussing the review of the Financial Regulation covering the EU Budget. Based on the work carried out by the Council's Budgetary Committee (that has considered the amended European Commission proposal on several occasions over the last three months), Coreper will be trying to find a solution in terms of the important issues that are still pending, like negative expenses and income in agriculture or how the Commission delegates budget implementation work. The Spanish Presidency hopes Coreper will reach agreement in April to enable the ECOFIN Council in May to decide on the issue.
The Commission wants "negative" EAGGF spending (European Agriculture Guidance and Guarantee Fund), in other words money arising from repayment of misappropriated aid, the selling of public stocks or account clearance-, to be considered as "earmarked revenue" when the new Regulation comes into force (on 1 January 2003). The aim of this change is to technically amend the two regulations in question (the Financial Regulation and the EAGGF Regulation) so the current system can be kept whereby negative expenditure is income to be exclusively allotted to agriculture, since does not currently appear like this in the Budget. The French, Belgian, and Spanish delegations want to keep the negative expenditure system (in other words, they are refusing to accept the technical amendments proposed by the European Commission), while net contributors like the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden and Austria want negative spending to be allotted to the heading of general budget revenue (which means it could be used for purposes other than agricultural spending).
Other issues to be covered by Coreper include the award of contracts in the field of external relations (some big countries want bids sent in by nationals of non-EU Member States to be excluded apart from in duly justified exceptional cases); the negative reservation to be kept (Finland is particularly opposed to this system which is sees as untransparent); the conditions governing the Commission's delegating of public inspection and budgetary implementation work (the Commission is proposing to delegate them to bodies under Community law, entities set up by the Communities or national state bodies or state-backed public service bodies, but not all the Council agree with this idea).