You, the European Council, decide who you won’t reimburse

“We should put all the unpaid bills that we cannot pay on the Council’s table. They, between them, can say ‘France won’t get this, Greece won’t get that, all the other countries, this is what we cannot pay you’. For example, we can’t pay the British rebate this year, we’ll pay it next year, it will be delayed. You, the Council, decide who you won’t reimburse,” said the Chairman of the EPP Group, Joseph Daul, during the plenary debate on the preparations for the next European Council meeting (24-25 October).

The Chairman of the largest political Group in the European Parliament expressed his disappointment at the fact that the agreement made between the European Parliament and the Council on the next Multiannual Financial Framework has not been respected: “I don’t understand how the Council works anymore. Parliament was very clear: the 2013 3.9 billion euro deficit had to be cleared. 2. A revision clause. 3. The establishment of a High Level Group on a system of own resources. These 3.9 billion Euros, this is not extra money we are asking for. It is not Parliament money, it’s money for projects that has been spent, approved but not financed.”

Joseph Daul stressed that European Treaties do not allow for an EU structural deficit and called on the Member States to act responsibly: “It is not possible to continue like this. We will have a 20 billion euro deficit in 2014, everyone says it. We have to sit around a table, all of us, to see what we won’t finance, what we won’t put in place. If we can’t continue to work together, honestly, we will have to find other solutions and we will have to block.”