Brussels, 11/04/2002 (Agence Europe) - The Permanent Representatives' Committee for EU Member States (Coreper) discussed the complex issue of the recasting of the Financial Regulation on Wednesday but failed to settle the two main outstanding issues that Member States' delegations remain divided over, namely how to deal with negative agriculture spending and how to delegate specific budgetary tasks to public authorities. Diplomatic sources suggest that the discussions on Wednesday did enable countries to lift some of their less important reservations (the Netherlands and Austria on measures concerning the Court of Auditors' Statement of Assurance, and Spain on the scrapping of the internal financial controllers) and were constructive enough to enable the Council to hope to be able to formulate general guidelines on this issue before the end of the Spanish Presidency.
Seven delegations again opposed the Commission's proposal to scrap negative expenditure in agriculture and turn it into earmarked expenditure. The seven countries in question want negative expenditure to remain (meaning agriculture aid recuperated, for example, through the accounts clearance system that returns to the EAGGF budget but is not taken into account when calculating ceilings for agricultural expenditure) until the end of 2006 at the earliest (when the current Financial Perspectives expire). It appears that two other countries are prepared to follow these seven as long as in 2007 such negative expenditure is permanently scrapped. As for the issue of hiving off expenditure to national public bodies, some countries (like the UK, Germany and France) are reported to refuse to agree to the word "state guarantee" as the description of a body carrying out public service missions (each for different reasons). Other countries reportedly want such bodies to be unable to be delegated work concerning EU external action.
EP Committee on Budgets threatens to bring cooperation with Council to an end
The turn taken by the examination of this issue in Council bodies has prompted Terence Wynn, Chair of the Parliamentary Committee on Budgets, to draft a letter addressed to the EU15 Ministers for the Economy and Finance. In his letter, he expresses the hope that the EP will not be forced to "bring cooperation with the Council to an end". He also expresses "deep personal concern" about the large number of positions taken by the Council's Budgetary Committee in the text forwarded to Coreper. In his view, the changes made to the Commission's initial proposal, if they are to be endorsed by the Council, would have the effect of reducing the scope of the budgetary powers exercised by the Parliament for many years. Mr Wynn even mentions the risk that the EP's budgetary power may regress, and stressed that the financial regulation must reflect the institutional balance established by the Treaty and guarantee that the two branches of budgetary authority are placed on an equal level in conformity with their respective powers.
EUROPE has reason to believe that the EP is concerned about the current Council position on the following themes of the financial regulation, a position that would result in reducing its powers or distancing itself too far from Commission proposals that it considers important: - the acquisition of land and buildings (the Council has reportedly abolished the right conferred upon the Community to take out building loans); - emergency reserve (the Council has introduced a new paragraph making it compulsory for the Commission to present a specific transfer request for every single operation); - conciliation procedure (the Council would only accept this procedure to amend financial regulations, but not for the three-yearly review); - executive agencies (some Council delegations would like to delete the mention of "bodies with a public service mission guaranteed by the state", in reference to bodies that could, like the Commission, be entrusted with budgetary implementation). The EP also challenges the position of Member States on the procedure to be followed regarding the supplementary and correcting budget (SCR) or credit transfers.