Brussels, 23/05/2002 (Agence Europe) - On Monday, the Council should adopt, without debate, its common guideline on the proposal to reshape the financial regulation, after Italy waived the only reservation that remained on Wednesday (within Coreper, the Committee of Permanent Representatives of Member States to the EU) over the conditions for the delegation, by the Commission, of budgetary execution tasks to certain public bodies. For its part, the European Parliament is actively preparing its work on the issue before the discussion procedure, scheduled for 4 June in Luxembourg on the fringe of the EcoFin Council, which will be preceded next Tuesday by a budgetary trilogy.
The Italian delegation accepted the compromise of the Spanish Presidency which allows, notably through a Commission declaration, to take account of its desire to exclude external actions from the budgetary executing tasks that the Commission may hand national public bodies. The declaration states that that it is not in the Commission's immediate intention to have recourse to national bodies for the management of programmes in the realm of external relations. In addition, EUROPE has reason to believe that the Italian Foreign Ministry did not want national bodies to manage certain responsibilities of the EuropeAid Co-operation Office (Aidco). The Commission therefore undertook that the most of the management tasks of external aid should remain the job of that body. You may recall that at the EcoFin Council , on 7 May, ministers noted that there was agreement on the text as a whole (that requires unanimity), except for the Italian reservation.
At the first meeting of the Parliamentary Committee on the Budgets, the rapporteur on the issue, Gianfranco Dell'Alba (Italian, Bonino list) explained to his colleagues that the EP especially wanted to discuss with the Council the subject of the procedures for the examination of the amending and supplementary budgets (ASB) and the negative reserve (that allows to increase external policy spending by providing, in advance, for this increase to be compensated by credits under headings not used in the budget as a whole). As the Chef de Cabinet of Michaele Schreyer summarised, regarding the ASB, the EP should try to secure that the Council cannot block a procedure. Regarding the negative reserve, Dell'Alba explained that the EP wanted to secure a certain amount of flexibility in the procedure.