Commenting on the decision, Mariann Fischer Boel, Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development, said: “We have been working very hard to ensure the best possible control over farm spending. The clearance procedure is a vital process in ensuring that taxpayers’ money is used properly and that incorrectly spent amounts are recovered. We have made enormous progress over recent years in improving controls and I am determined that these efforts will continue in the future.”
Main financial corrections
Under this latest decision, the 24th since the 1995 reform of the system for recovering unduly spent CAP money, funds will be recovered from Austria, Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Spain, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Finland, Great Britain and Portugal.
The most significant individual corrections are:
* € 60.6 million charged to Spain for non-respect of payment deadlines in the nuts payment scheme;
* € 53.7 million charged to United Kingdom for non-respect of payment deadlines;
* € 48.5 million charged to Italy for non-respect of payment deadlines;
* € 35.8 million charged to Greece because the LPIS (Land parcel identification system) implemented to manage the direct payments schemes was found to be not fully operational to the standard required and on-the-spot checks were still carried out too late to be fully effective;
* € 26.7 million charged to the Netherlands because of the insufficient number of substitution controls in the export refund scheme;
* € 17 million charged to Spain for non-respect of payment deadlines;
* € 8.7 million charged to France concerning the over thirty months slaughter scheme – technical and accounting controls were found to be deficient;
* € 7.5 million charged to France for weaknesses in the control system for subsidised-interest-loans and in secondary controls concerning Rural Development Programmes expenditure;
