Mr. Kevin Cardiff:

In fact, we are so concerned about it that one of my colleagues organised a conference on it just a few days ago, which included people from the Commission, EIB and other areas. There were also some people from the budget committee, CONT. There is quite a difference of opinion between those of us on the accountability side, the auditors and parliamentarians, and those on the implementation side. If one thinks about it, the essence of a financial instrument of the type we use is that it is in some sort of partnership. The EU provides a guarantee so that someone else will provide funding for a project or we provide funds which are lent to a bank or financial institution which are then on lend to the final beneficiaries and so forth. In terms of a simple financial audit, we could just stop at the point where the moneys reach the bank concerned or at the point where the guarantee is given but that does not say much about the effectiveness of the programmes. We said it in our landscape review, which was a broad review of accountability in 2014, and we say it again in this year's annual report and in a lot of other public pronouncements. There are some risks. Financial instruments can be very powerful and they have some really important advantages, including that one gets greater leverage and more miles to the gallon in terms of the impact of one's euro. However, the risk is that it is difficult to account for these and to say how effective they are.

It is difficult to provide good accounting for them and for us sometimes to carry out performance audits. We have audit rights over the European Union budget but not in all cases over private institutions. We think the Parliament and Council as legislators and the Commission as implementer in chief ought to have a little more regard to the accountability systems that are being applied. In fairness to them, however, we are conscious that these are people who are trying to change the whole system of European support for the economies of Europe in a relatively short time. There is a great deal of work going on and people are trying very hard to make the euro more effective but perhaps not every point is being addressed and some of the accountability points may be among them.