EU Budgets Lisbon Projects Without Legal Authority
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While the European Commission was being warned last week that its accounts won’t be signed off by the Court of Auditors for the 14th year in a row, the parliament was carrying on dolling out public money without lawful authority.
The Lisbon Treaty is not in force, and may eventually be abandoned. But for the EU such minor irritations are swept aside. The show goes on as if Lisbon were ratified and in place.
They have done the same before. In 2006 the then Austrian foreign minister boasted at a meeting of the European Parliament?s Constitutional Affairs Committee that the 36 projects and institutions dependant on the then discredited Constitutional Treaty were going ahead anyway ? and they did. They are still there today, standing on no legal base whatsoever.
Now they?re at it again.
In the Budget Control Committee last week several members tried to delete the 2009 budgets allocated for new EU agencies and projects on the same grounds ? that they had no legal standing until and unless Lisbon is ratified.
All credit to Tory MEP Christopher Heaton-Harris from the East Midlands. He had done much of the homework and rightly told members that the allocation of money to projects lacking a legal base was specifically against the rules of procedure of the parliament.
“What is the point of the Lisbon Treaty (and the Constitutional Treaty before it) if it is not to give legality to future expansion and new projects??, he asked.
No answer. We voted. We lost. The budgets passed. The socialists also voted through all the increases in EU expenditure, just by way of an encore.
So what are these new illegal EU institutions? Amongst others, new police colleges (allocated just under eight million euros of public money) a new fisheries institution (also eight million euros), and contributions to European political parties (10.8 million).
Given the parlous state of the fishing industry as a direct and exclusive fault of the EU?s catastrophic fishing policy and quota system, setting up a separate fisheries institution at this late stage is akin to throwing fuel on a raging inferno.
One crumb of good news. We did manage to vote down a three million euro increase in funds allocated to additional staff involved in regional policy, but the budget was already set at 55 million!
But, the committee countered that in spades by approving another 75 million euros for the fight against fraud, despite the almost total ineffectiveness of OLAF’s activities over the last decade.
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