EU accounting row

No way of knowing if hands have been in the euro till

The European Union's budget management is described as 'out of control' by its former chief accountant.

Marta Andreasen refused to sign off last year's accounts and has now been removed from her post.

She says the systems are 'shambolic' and the budget of 98 billion Euros - more than £60 billion - is managed without reference to normal accounting standards, on hopelessly inadequate computer programmes and in defiance of the EU's own rules.

She suggests that financial management in Brussels is so inept, that doubts should be raised over accounts stretching back over the past ten years. And that consequently there is no way of knowing whether fraud is still rife.

Conservative MP David Davis was former head of the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee. He is demanding that Neil Kinnock be recalled.

And fellow Conservative Edward McMillan-Scott MEP sits on the European Parliament's Budget Committee. He organised the protest against the Commission's budgetary practices in 1999 which led to the mass resignation of the commission in March 1999. He says little has changed.

Eluned Morgan is the Labour Spokesperson on the European Parliament's Budget Control Committee. She told The World at One that the EU's reform process cannot be turned around overnight.