Extracts from a speech by Mrs. Marta Andreasen, formerly Chief Accountant at the European Union Commission, to a meeting organised by the No Campaign, held at the Lewis Media Centre, Millbank Tower, Westminster, on Monday 6th December, 2004.
It is noteworthy that Mrs. Andreasen was speaking from a pro-EU position, which serves to highlight the appalling nature of the way in which the Commission uses our money.
I first want to thank you for the opportunity to speak to all of you. I regret that I don't have the same opportunity to speak in Spain, which is my home country. ...... I believe this is not the time to draw up a constitution but instead to look at the existing institutional structures and decide what we want for the future. It is the moment to look to the past and analyse what went wrong - and I believe a lot has gone wrong - and reform the EU. I have lived through a particular experience which I am coming here to share with you, but not all of it because it is very deep and lengthy.
I was appointed Chief Accounting Officer of the European Commission on 1st January, 2002. It is worthwhile to point out that I was the first qualified accountant to be appointed to that job. I was particularly proud to become an official of an institution which I believed to be a shining example of transparent and reliable financial management. Very soon, however, I found out that, far from this, the European Commission happily allowed its accounting systems to be open to the risk of error and fraud.
The European Commission is the executive arm of the European Union but it is also the regulator of the European Union. ...... As a financial regulator the European Commission issues a series of directives that include those related to accounting standards, corporate governance, transparency, accountability and others. But I have found that it literally preaches the opposite of what it observes in its internal administration. ......
In 1998 there were allegations of financial mismanagement and fraud which prompted an investigation by a group of "wise men". They concluded that there was financial mismanagement and as a consequence the Santer commission had to resign. Eventually, at the beginning of the year 2000, a reform action plan was presented and should have been put into place. ...... However, when I joined the European Commission in 2002, I could see important structural failures that remained not only unresolved but also unaddressed.
I refer specifically to the vulnerability of the computer system on which the funds were being managed. The system did not allow for coherence in the transfer of information, nor did it ensure security in accessing the system. In my experience, anyone could access the system and change amounts, change the beneficiaries and change dates without leaving an audit trail.
The European Court of Auditors in its last report, presented in November 2004, confirms that this continues to be the case, and that there is still a lack of coherence and security in the computer system. ...... The Court recently refused to clear the EU budget for the tenth year in a row. The Court refused to give clearance to the legality and regularity of 95 percent of the payments made out of the Budget; it repeats year after year its reservations about the reliability of the accounts, indicating that these are matters that regularly recur and that they stem from the inadequacy of the accounting system. .......
The "wise men's" report concluded that the fundamental problem was that it was difficult to find anybody in the European Commission who was prepared to take any responsibility. I came and took responsibility - and was sacked five months afterwards. The administrative reform was supposed to address the problem of lack of responsibility. ...... But alas! To make people responsible for something you have to give them the necessary means, and the necessary means for these people was a reliable accounting system. But the European Commission did not find this to be a priority - and this has satisfied the Directors General, who have happily refused to assume any responsibility on the basis of the unreliability of the accounting system! And the game goes on and on. So here we stand, five years after the resignation of the Santer commission, facing the same state of affairs.
In my role as Chief Accounting Officer, I bore the highest fiduciary responsibility for the funds entrusted to the European Union. So I felt I had the right and the obligation to address all authorities that could take decisions to remedy the situation I had encountered. I was not asking for anything so extraordinary as sending a man to the moon. I was not asking for anything expensive or anything unachievable in the short term. I was simply asking for an independent treasury audit, an analysis of how funds were flowing and what controls were in place. (An independent treasury audit has not been performed in the life of the European Commission.) And I asked this only and precisely because I was responsible for all payments made through a computer system which not only myself but everybody knew was vulnerable to fraud. And I faced daily situations where I was not able to confirm either the correct identity of the beneficiary of the payment, or the correct amount of the payment. And I asked for the rotation of the Treasurer, who had been in the job for 14 years, working on a vulnerable system without any treasury audit.
I also asked for an accounting system that would respect the most basic of accounting principles - double-entry book-keeping - because I simply wanted to tie where the funds were coming from and where they were going to. I was also asking that the new financial regulation that was being publicised so much as the great reform of the European Commission should aim at strengthening the controls, and not loosen them as has been the case.
I will give you an example. According to good practice in all organisations, private or public, the accounting officer or the person who makes the payments normally has to see invoices and documents that support the justification of the payment. The new financial regulation has wiped this out so now the chief accounting officer of the European Commission signs payments without seeing any supporting documentation. This is an example of making a malpractice official. But instead of getting responses and approval for my proposals, I was removed and later suspended, and finally dismissed.
I was judged by those people who for twenty or thirty years had been managing the funds without control. They judged me and dismissed me on the basis of disloyalty, and I ask myself to whom I was disloyal. I wonder who can say that I am not a true European, or that I am Eurosceptic when I have risked my job defending the people's interests.
Let us not be confused. A vulnerable accounting system is a structural failure. It inhibits fraud prevention; it obstructs fraud detection and hinders proof of fraud. And maintaining a vulnerable accounting system in the knowledge that it is vulnerable is an irregular practice, to say the least, if not worse.
* * * * * *
One of the major political events of recent months was the Government's defeat, by the whopping margin of 78 per cent to 22 per cent, in the referendum on having an elected North-East Regional Assembly. There were many reasons for opposing this measure, but one of them was that the assembly would have been a puppet of Brussels - the means whereby the EU Commission would have been able to by-pass Westminster and impose its policies directly through the regional assembly.
The message is clear: the people disagree with the Government's policy of regionalism and prefer our traditional system of local government. Instead of responding to this, however, the Government is pressing on with regionalism regardless, except that their regional assemblies remain unelected. This contempt for democracy, at least partly in the name of the European Union, should rouse people to outrage, so that proper self-government and democracy may be restored to our country. It should be the role of the political parties to be the means whereby the democratic will may be enacted, and we call on our readers to quiz their prospective parliamentary candidates about this in the coming weeks.
* * * * * *
Last autumn, Vote No, the main umbrella group preparing for a referendum on the EU constitution, published an ICM opinion poll which found that young voters are the most opposed to the proposed constitution, and that the Labour party's own supporters are around two to one against signing up.
Overall, 59 percent of voters oppose the EU constitution, with 28 percent in favour. The most strongly opposed age-group is 18-25 year olds, who oppose the constitution by 62 to 27 percent. Fifty-seven percent of Labour supporters are against the constitution, with 31 percent in favour. A majority of Liberal Democrat supporters are also against, despite the party's enthusiasm for the constitution; 54 percent of Lib Dem supporters are against and 34 percent in favour.
* * * * * *
On 24th September, The Economist also carried a report on the EU, featuring politicians claiming that deeper integration is unstoppable. Describing the way the EU works, the Prime Minister of Luxembourg, M. Jean-Claude Juncker, said, "We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't know what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back." Signor Giuliano Amato, the Vice-President of the Convention which drew up the EU constitution, claimed that if one country did say "no" in a referendum the EU would probably ignore them. He said "legally we could not proceed, but politically we could not stop".
Politicians of this ilk are no longer having everything their own way, however. Claims that deeper integration is "inevitable" are no longer believed by the public. A few years ago voters in focus groups had a powerful sense that it was "inevitable" that Britain would join the euro, including even those who were opposed to joining. Britain's economic success since deciding not to join the euro has destroyed that sense of inevitability, and it will now be harder for the Government to pressure voters into accepting the EU constitution.
Furthermore, in September, the President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus, described the EU constitution as a threat to freedom. He called it "a radical text with wide-ranging consequences for freedom and for the well-being and future of the nation state". He added that the EU Constitution "does not resolve Europe's real problems". He said that, "European countries should be good partners but their differences should not be sacrificed on the altar of a united Europe, something which has never existed and which, I hope, will never exist."
* * * * * *
On 12 January the European Parliament voted to endorse the EU
Constitution. A majority of MEPs from Britain, Poland and the
Czech Republic opposed it.
In a Parliamentary written answer recently the British
Government said that the EU Commission has six different EU
budget lines for "information", and that last year the
Commission allocated £6 million for "The Debate on the Future of
the EU". On top of this, EU-funded think-tanks, cultural
organisations and other bodies "advancing the idea of Europe"
received more than £4 million from the Commission in 2003.
Bodies which have received EU funds include the European
Movement, which is part of the pro-EU Constitution campaign,
Britain in Europe. In a recent written answer to Geoffrey van
Orden, MEP, another British Conservative, the Commission said
that it had only spent £3 million on the debate on the future of
the EU. Because of a complicated system of numbered budget
lines, it is difficult to find out exactly how much the
Commission is spending.
It has also been reported that Labour MEP Richard Corbett
will be paid an extra £2,000 a year by the European Parliament
to promote the EU Constitution around Europe. Needless to say,
no equivalent funding will be made available to MEPs opposing
the Constitution for campaigning against it.
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office officially has an EU
Communications budget of £200,000 a year, which from November
2003 to October 2004 funded more than seventy events as well as
"a range of publications and media relations activity". In
reality, however, the UK Government will spend much more heavily
in the run-up to a referendum on the EU Constitution.
The French Government is spending ten million euros selling
the Constitution, and lavish taxpayer-funded propaganda has been
freely distributed at major football matches in Spain. It is
likely that our own Government will also spend large sums.
Pro-Constitution campaigners will disingenuously claim to be the
underdogs in a referendum. But, in reality, the ability of the
EU institutions and the British Government to spend huge sums of
public money promoting the EU Constitution gives them an unfair
advantage over the No campaign.
* * * * * *
Under the guise of simplifying things for businesses, the
European Union Commission could be trying to introduce EU-wide
corporate taxes by stealth.
* * * * * *
Letter to the Editor of The Daily Telegraph (not
published) by Mr. Peter Dul,
Chairman of the Anti-Common Market League, sent on 2nd November,
2004.
Sir,
Mr. Blenkinsop of the Young European Movement (essentially an
EU "front" organisation) asserts that "nearly 60 per cent of our
total trade is with the European Union". It is hardly
surprising that the percentage has actually grown, since there
were only six members of the EEC when the UK joined it. What
this 60 per cent actually refers to, however, is "exports of
manufactured goods", which account for less than half of the
total UK exports.
Only about ten per cent of our output and jobs support our
trade with the EU; another ten per cent goes to trade with the
rest of the world and the remaining 80 per cent remains in our
domestic market. One hundred thousand regulations imposed on us
by the EU make up the acquis communautaire and in many ways
damage the competitiveness of our economy, 90 per cent of which
has nothing to do with the EU. These regulations cannot be
amended or repealed by Westminster no matter how damaging they
are.
The UK no more has to become the fifty-first state of America
to trade with the USA than it needs to be a member of the EU to
trade with it. Mexico, a member of the North American Free
Trade Agreement, can and does have a free-trade agreement with
the EU, affording it full access to the Single Market. It is
nonsense to suggest that if this country were not in the EU, the
EU would try to interfere in some way in trade with its largest
and most important client. They sell to us far more than we
sell to them, which means they have many more jobs dependent on
their trade with us than we do on our trade with them. If we
left the EU, they would come begging to us to make sure we
signed a free trade agreement with them. If Mexico, Switzerland
and twenty other countries can have free trade agreements with
the EU, so can we; the EU is negotiating free-trade agreements
with a further 69 countries, which will total 91 countries in
all - around half the countries in the world. Retiring EU
Commissioner Neil Kinnock has in fact stated that leaving the EU
need make no difference to the UK's trade with the EU.
Indeed, leaving the EU and once more living under laws made
by our own elected and removable representatives would in fact
mean a huge boost to the economy of at least £40bn per annum;
massively bigger than our defence budget of £27bn before Mr.
Hoon's latest cuts. Given the dead hand of bureaucratic
over-regulation from the EU, the 90 per cent of our economy not
concerned with trade with the EU would benefit enormously from
being freed from such strangulation. The reality is that the
road to independence is also the road to prosperity.
The Dutch government has calculated that EU over-regulation
costs the Dutch economy about 2 per cent of their GDP. It
certainly does not cost the UK less, particularly given the
practice of "gold-plating" EU legislation which is Whitehall's
customary practice. This would total £20bn per annum, to which
should be added our budget contributions totalling £11bn per
annum, at least £1bn per annum for the destruction of our
fishing industry, another £1bn for the ruin of our modern art
market, etc., etc.; the saving of £40bn per annum is in fact a
conservative estimate.
As for inward investment, foreigners invest here because of
our reliable workforce, low taxation and regulatory r‚gime (in
danger of being destroyed by the EU), and because we speak
English. Little evidence exists, in any event, that inward
investment creates many jobs, and 80 per cent of it goes into
oil, gas and services, which do not supply EU markets.
Returning to self-governing independence would lead to
job-creation and, dependent upon what our own elected
Westminster MPs choose to do, a huge sum would be available for
either an increase in public spending or a reduction in taxation.
Yours faithfully,
PETER J. DUL, Chairman, Anti-Common Market League.
* * * * * *
On Friday 22nd October, the League held an Autumn Reception
at the Hoop and Toy public house in South Kensington, at which
Lord Pearson of Rannoch showed his video What is the Point of
the European Union? The Case to Leave, originally shown on
the BBC1's Politics Show, and answered questions. Sir
Richard Body, the League's President, also spoke, and Mr.
Vladimir Bukovsky was also present.
* * * * * *
Members will be well aware of the answer to this question and
are urged to secure a supply of Campaigning Cards available from
the Anti Maastricht Alliance, to help them enlighten other
people. These cards can be offered to individuals, left under
windscreen wipers or in library books or posted with payments to
companies. Cheques (payable to AMA) should be sent to the
address on the card.
We reproduce below the wording on both sides of the card
(2.25" x 3.5")
Order now: £20 for 20, £7 for 100 cards
Cheques to:- "AMA", at 46 manor House Gardens, Edenbridge,
TN8 5EG
BID FOR EU-WIDE TAXES
LETTER FROM THE CHAIRMAN
THE LEAGUE'S RECENT ACTIVITIES
WHAT DID THE EU EVER DO FOR US?
What did the EU ever do for
us? 1. After 30 years in the EU our payments to it total £75
billion that would have been better spent on British
people 4. All UK firms are subjected to a flood of
Brussels Regulations (100,000 so far) despite 91% of them having
no EU links 2. Yet we buy more than we sell to EU countries and are
out of pocket by £175 billion, which hurts British
jobs 5. The Common Fisheries Policy has robbed us of a
British asset, ruined our fishing industry and created a social
and environmntal calamity 3. UK trade has been distorted towards countries whose
economies are strangled by the Euro and whose prospects are even
worse 6. The Common Agricultural Policy puts up the
price of our food, burdens British farmers and impoverishes
those of the Third World