Committee on Budgetary Control (CONT) voted in favour of three reports of Ryszard Czarnecki, ECR Group Coordinator in CONT on discharge 2014 for European Court of Auditors, European Ombudsman and European Council and Council.

Committee on Budgetary Control (CONT) voted in favour of three reports of Ryszard Czarnecki, ECR Group Coordinator in CONT on discharge 2014 for European Court of Auditors, European Ombudsman and European Council and Council.

According to Mr Czarnecki EU institutions are lacking in geographic balance in employing middle and top managing staff which can be observed e.g. in the European Court of Auditors. “The so-called new EU members are still being treated as a poor cousin”, Mr Czarnecki said. The ECR Group Coordinator in CONT stressed that ECA required improvement also in terms of translation cost as well as special reports’ procedure and their content which often remained imprecise.

While referring to the European Ombudsman, European Parliament’s VP underlined in particular the post of own-initiative inquiry coordinator. “This function is vague mainly in terms of coordinator’s competences”, stressed Mr Czarnecki.

As in the previous years, CONT critically assessed cooperation with the Council pointing out problems in terms of exchange of information and documents. “We observe lack of readiness to cooperation on the Council’s side again. It does not reply neither to letters of particular CONT Members nor to the official letters of the Committee. EU institutions must work in a transparent way. Therefore we do not have grounds to grant discharge”, Mr Czarnecki said