22/10/2013
An extraordinary situation is developing in the European Parliament, which is sitting for the second time this month in Strasbourg, the drama starting yesterday, in the opening of what is technically known as the "part session".
Then, EP president Martin Schulz (pictured)
confronted MEPs with the news that, at 7.30 in the morning, he had received a 'phone call from Commission president Barroso, telling him that the Commission would be unable to honour its payments by mid-November unless a supplementary amendment budget was approved, to the tune of â¬2.7 billion.
The shortfall, he had been told, had arisen as a result of insufficient customs duties having been paid, so a top-up was needed from the "own resource" â the direct payments from member states â in order to make ends meet.
This is in addition to the
â¬3.9 billion amendment to the 2013 budget, which the Parliament was expecting to approve this week. But that sum first needs Council approval which, as yet, has not been given. Contrary to an
earlier report, mistakenly repeated on the
UKIP website, there had only been an agreement by
permanent representatives.
Their role is to prepare decisions of the Council so they were only able to prepare the Council's position on a package which included the â¬3.9 billion. It also included an additional â¬400 million for the solidarity fund, to pay Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic, hit by extreme flooding in May and June this year.
However, this still needs a political assent from EU member state ministers and while a Council meeting was supposed to have been held yesterday, Schulz himself was vague as to the outcome. In fact, on the
Council website there is no record of a meeting which could have approved the supplementary budget.
According to
Euractiv, the matter should have been discussed at the General Affairs Council (GAC) on 19 October, but the Lithuanian Presidency had not included the item 14 days in advance of the meeting.
When this happens, individual member states can oppose the inclusion of an item in the agenda. The UK took advantage of this and refused to allow the issue to be discussed. From the Council website, it thus appears that the routine GAC has been delayed until tomorrow, with no budget item on the agenda.
Euractiv is saying that the supplementary budget will not be discussed at GAC until 30 October.
The uncertainty has already led to the Parliament delaying a vote on the multi-annual budget, approval of which was conditional on a settlement of the 2013 budget, which is now up in the air again.
A BBC
video record and an
Irish Times report attest to growing confusion as to the exact situation, and some disbelief at Barroso's statement. As of Friday, there had been no hint of a financial crisis, and now, it seems, the whole of the EU finances are to come skidding to a halt by mid-November.
Comparisons are now being made between the US government, which is galloping down the path to default, unable to pay its bills, and the Commission. It looks set to be in the same position.
But what is extraordinary about this growing drama is that it remains almost completely unreported in the British legacy media, despite the UK's blocking action. There is some twitter traffic and
Spiegel has published a piece. This has Barroso accused of "irresponsible scaremongering" (there is such a thing as responsible scaremongering).
For the UK, though, only the BBC website clip is available, and that by no means offers a complete picture. No doubt, the media will catch up, but in the meantime we will be watching closely to see how the situation develops.
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