Commissioner Günther H. Oettinger in charge of Budget and Human Resources and Commissioner Vera Jourová in charge of Justice, Consumers and Gender Equality, welcome European Parliament’s consent to establishing the European Public Prosecutor’s Office. They declared:
“We welcome today’s vote of the European Parliament, giving its green light to the creation of a European Public Prosecutor’s Office. A vast majority of Members of the European Parliament decided to endorse this historic step. An EU public prosecutor will help to better protect EU tax payer’s money. Existing EU bodies such as the EU Anti-Fraud office, OLAF, cannot prosecute in the Member States but have to hand over their files to national bodies. This can make it more difficult to pursue cross border cases and to bring cases to a timely conclusion. The new EU public prosecutor will do exactly that – make sure that criminals are brought to justice and that misspent money is recovered much more quickly. (…) As President Juncker said in his State of the Union speech, the new European Public Prosecutor can be a powerful tool to protect citizens even beyond its current competence for crimes against the EU budget. The European Public Prosecutor’s Office could also be tasked also with prosecuting cross-border terrorist crimes. Next year, the Commission will lay out the next steps on a future extension of the tasks of the new European Public Prosecutor’s Office. For now our immediate priority is to establish an independent, strong and effective European Public Prosecutor to fight crimes against the EU budget, and to get it up and running as soon as possible. Today’s consent paves the way for the Council to adopt the Regulation next week.”
