COUNCIL OF MINISTERS: NO COMPROMISE ON COMMITTEE PROCEDURE.

Germany had withdrawn this point from the agenda of the last General Affairs Council on May 17 in the hope of reaching a consensus on May 31. This latest failure will have ramifications for the day-to-day operations of the committees, given that the European Parliament has frozen the Euro 19.735 million originally allocated in the EU's 1999 Budget for the committee procedures "with a view to keeping up the pressure exerted on all the parties concerned in the hope that will come up with a fir and effective solution". The General Secretariat of the European Commission has now requested its various Directorates-General to postpone all meetings, limit the number of participants to be refunded, and inform the various experts working for the European Commission that there may be a delay in the refund of their expenses.The Chairman of the European Parliament's Committee on Budgets, German Socialist Detlev Samland, is no longer calling for the Regulatory Committees to be scrapped. In a letter addressed to the President-in-Office of the EU Council of Ministers, Joschka Fischer, he said he is prepared to go along with the following compromise for this type of committee:- Should the Council fail to act, the European Commission will adopt the measure proposed once the deadline set by the basic...