14
Dec
2023
Watch
Improving the strategic approach to the enforcement of EU Law (debate)
Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, for once I agree with my colleagues. When a petition arrives here, when citizens complain, the Commission does not act on it because, supposedly, these complaints concern individual cases or various facts. This is also the attitude of the European Medicines Agency and your Brussels administration, which counts 12,000 deaths and millions of side effects of vaccines against COVID-19, Pfizer and others, without drawing the consequences and which hide the information from the public at the bottom of a drawer. The Commission's current approach of not giving access to documents and SMS, of ignoring petitions, of ignoring citizens by sending petitions back to countries, results in the blocking of procedures for years in the pre-litigation phase, without transmission to the courts and without access to essential documents. Faced with this opaque bureaucracy of Brussels, the best defense is the attack, as the Emperor Napoleon said. Let us talk about the latest report of the European Court of Auditors on public procurement in Europe. Every year, some €2 trillion is procured. The Court concludes that the duration of administrative proceedings has doubled in ten years. Neither Eurostat nor the Commission monitors public procurement prices. The level of competition has decreased over the last decade. Two key indicators are used by the Court to measure non-competition between public contracts: no invitation to tender and single tenderer. Does that remind you of anything? Me, it reminds me of the contracts for the purchase of COVID-19 vaccines with these prices and secret clauses. Finally, I will quote the Court of Auditors: Since public procurement involves large sums of public money, there is a risk of fraud and corruption. In public procurement, transparency is therefore essential to ensure that decision-makers are all held accountable for their actions. The European Ombudsman asked us last week to fight corruption and she is right. This must be a priority for all of us, and Qatargate must not hide the Pfizergate.