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"It's immeasurable, you don't have a system to record transactions properly. You have a balance sheet that the commission presents every year with its assets and liabilities that is built on the aggregation of spreadsheets - have you ever seen this? I think the shop on the corner doesn't have this type of accounting system."
"It's like going to a bank and somebody telling you the safeboxes are open. You have to prove if somebody took the money away, but the fact they are open makes it easy to have fraud or money going away."
"Kinnock has failed first of all to implement reforms because he failed after three years to have a coherent and secure accounting system."
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Marta Andreasen, former Chief Accountant of the European Union who refused to sign off the EU's accounts for 2001. She was forced out of her job in May 2002 by Neil Kinnock. Interview with Tim Sebastian, Hardtalk, BBC, 2 October 2002. More on Andreasen.
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"The commission is inadequately equipped to fully meet its accounting responsibilities [and has an] immature attitude to financial record-keeping."
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Ernst & Young, Accountants. Internal report on EU's financial management, Jan 2004, in which it stimates that £4.5 billion of the EU's £63 billion annual budget is swallowed by fraud.
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EU systems administering the £63 billion annual budget are "out of control" with "obvious risks as regards liability".
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EU Court of Auditors, August 2002. Set up in 1977 to oversee the EU's finances, and required since 1992 to sign off the EU's accounts. As of 2003 they have refused to so without qualification.
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"From the statistics available... it is not possible to draw conclusions on the actual levels of fraud against the general budget. These uncertainties also make it impossible to conclude whether the level of irregularity and fraud is improving or worsening. The goal [of implementing a robust budgetary system] by 2005 is over-ambitious."
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National Audit Office report, May 2004, quoted in Daily Telegraph 6 May 2004. |
"You are lucky you aren't in Burma or Central Africa, where journalists get the real treatment."
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Brussels police, on arresting Hans-Martin Tillack, correspondent for Germany's Stern magazine, searching his office and home, and interrogating him to identify his sources. Quoted by Tillack in Daily Telegraph, 20 March 2004. Tillack has broken several major stories about cover-ups by the EU's anti-fraud office, OLAF, and its predecessor UCLAF, which covered up abuses by the disgraced Santer Commission. A few weeks later his office was again raided, and police took mobile phones, computers and 17 boxes of documents. OLAF alleges Tillack paid a bribe to obtain a leaked copy of one of their reports, but their real goal is clearly to intimidate him and his sources. |
"I have witnessed almost 200 MEPs hurrying to the central register to sign on for a session and then watched them drive to the nearest airport or station. There are countless MEPs who go to Strasbourg and Brussels simply to pick up the €262 [attendance allowance]."
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Hans-Peter Martin, Austrian Social Democrat MEP and former Spiegel journalist, quoted in Germany's Bild Zeitung, March 2003. Martin claims to have documented 7,200 attendance abuses by MEPs between 2001 and 2004, as a result of which... he was shamelessly suspended by the socialist group in parliamement. |
"I can't be blamed or asked to take responsibility for something I don't know about."
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Pedro Solbes, EU Commissioner responsible for the scandal-struck Eurostat agency. Quoted in Daily Telegraph, May 2004. |
"The moral of this story is that every commissioner is untouchable as long as they make sure civil servants keep them in the dark. This is madness." |
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Jens-Peter Bonde, Danish MEP, quoted in Daily Telegraph, May 2004, in response to Solbes's statement that Commissioners can only be responsible for scandals in their agencies about which they know. |
"In the case of structural measures [which amount to many billion of Euros per annum] the same types of error occurred at Member State level with the same frequency as in previous years... in the case of internal policies [more billions] the transactions are still affected by significant errors in terms of legality and regularity... in the case of external actions [more billions], the irregularities noted in the past are persisting at local level."
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Juan Manuel Fabra Vallés, President of the EU Court of Auditors, 8-9 August 2003.
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If you have an authenticated quotation on Europe, the EEC or the EU that you think should be listed here, then email me .
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