European Commission President Romano Prodi promised on Thursday to clean up a damaging multimillion-euro financial scandal, but rejected demands that he sack members of the commission.
The former Italian prime minister told party leaders and members of the European Parliament (MEPs) at the European parliament that he was working to "stop the rot."
Prodi spoke of his "sadness" at allegations of slush funds, false contracts and echoes of the scandal which brought down his pre-decessor four years ago.
He said the main blame lay with the former director of the EU statistics agency (Eurostat), whose conduct he called "appalling."
In a message which combined contrition for past errors with determination to right wrongs, Prodi said there would no rush to judgment.
"Additional investigations will be opened to stop the rot once and for all," he pledged. "I didn't hide anything."
But there were no grounds to dismiss Pedro Solbes, the economic affairs commissioner, whose scalp several MEPs had demanded because he was responsible for Eurostat.
Neil Kinnock, the commission's vice president for reform and Michaele Schreyer, the commissioner in charge of the EU's 90-billion euros annual budget, were also cleared by their boss.
The leaders of the main center-right and center-left groups said they were not seeking commissioners' scalps despite evidence of wrongdoing in three separate reports on the Luxembourg-based statistics agency.
"It is premature to arrive at any conclusive judgment," said Pat Cox, the president of the parliament.
"This is a sobering reality check that has revealed gaps in governance that will have to be addressed. Trust is essential."
Reports on Wednesday showed taxpayers' money going astray through double accounting, fictitious contracts and slush funds. There was also evidence that cash had been used to fund perks such as a volleyball team and a riding club. About five million euros went missing between 1996 and 2001 though more than 1.2 million euros were recovered.
Leaving aside the question of personal gain, the commission's Eurostat task force said: "The lack of control with which those funds were managed creates an unacceptably high exposure to the risk of fraud and irregularities."
Euroskeptic MEPs argued that the issue of political responsibility had been ducked by the task force.
"This is not one crook, two crooks or five," said Jens-Peter Bonde from Denmark. "This is a parallel illegal system of financing."
Chris Heaton-Harris, a British Conservative, said. "It's Groundhog Day. By now someone should have carried the can for this.
When Solbes is shown the door, he should leave it open for Kinnock and Schreyer."
Prodi, who came to Brussels pledging zero tolerance of the fraud, cronyism and mismanagement which destroyed Jacques Santer, could take comfort from the fact that most of the trouble at Eurostat seemed to predate his arrival. But it appeared that illegal slush funds were operating until July.
Prodi said the worst aspect of the affair was the behavior of Eurostat's former director-general, Yves Franchet, who he implied had deceived Solbes.
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