1993 discharge: 6th EDF

The European Parliament granted the Commission discharge for the financial management of the sixth European Development Fund (EDF) for the 1993 financial year on the basis of the following figures: - annual income: contributions paid ECU 1,609,339,000 miscellaneous income: ECU 20,897,000 - annual expenditure: ECU 571,591,000 At the same time, Parliament set out a series of observations on the financial management of the EDF in the 1993 financial year: thus it approved the concept of the European Development Funds as multilateral development funds, as an efficient and fair system for implementing long-term structural development aid, but found that the current provisions governing the funding of the EDF were incompatible with this system and that this state of affairs would continue until such time as the EDF were included in the budget. With regard to the implementation of the budget, the European Parliament was still worried about the rate of implementation of the EDF and called on the Commission to draft provisions so that appropriations for national or regional programmes not used within a specific period of time after their transfer could be reallocated to the following EDF. With regard to administration and management, the European Parliament called on the Commission to revise the financial regulations applicable to EDF in order to bring them more closely into line with the terms of implementation of the EDF. Any changes which the Commission made to the management and accounting systems of the EDF should be brought to Parliament's attention in the Court of Auditors' annual report. It also called for errors identified by the Court of Auditors in the 1993 EDF accounts to be corrected in the 1994 accounts. With regard to structural adjustment, Parliament stressed the importance of respecting the principle of democracy governing the granting of aid under the structural adjustment facility. It called for the Community to take all possible measures to rectify the serious social consequences of structural reform and for the Court of Auditors to include an evaluation of the results obtained with structural adjustment in its annual report. It also felt that the counterpart funds set up in the sixth EDF were not being used in accordance with the priorities set by the Community in health and education and called on the Commission to exert its influence on the ACP governments in order to obtain a guarantee of suitable funding for these sectors. With regard to STABEX, the European Parliament expressed concerned about its funding and called on the Commission to ensure that ACP countries honoured their commitments on mutual obligation frameworks and for an in-depth review of the modus operandi of STABEX in the context of the new EDF. Finally, with regard to the funding of United Nations operations by the EDF, Parliament again stressed that appropriations could only be used for objectives for which provision was made for the purpose in the Lomé Convention.