The voluntary pension fund should also have been abolished with immediate effect.

I should like to finish off with the never-ending story about the voluntary pension fund.

I am today, as always, against voluntary pension funds that ignore salary differences, leading to unfair treatment.

We also support the rapporteur's remarks regarding the Members' voluntary pension fund.

What is now happening to this voluntary pension fund has been thrown out by the eurosceptics.

One final item that I would like to mention is that the voluntary pension fund causes me a great deal of concern.

As far as the voluntary pension fund is concerned, we have decided to support Amendment No 4.

Let me turn now to another sensitive subject, namely the voluntary pension fund for Members of this Parliament.

In my intervention earlier, I tried to correct the inaccurate claims about the voluntary pension fund, as did the fund chairman throughout the procedure.

The European Parliament pension fund is a voluntary pension fund.

This voluntary pension fund, as it stands, contains the total sum of EUR 202 million, which has been invested in the stock market.

I should specifically like to ask my fellow MEPs to endorse paragraph 105, which relates to the voluntary pension fund.

Firstly, we oppose the situation whereby the MEPs' voluntary pension fund is being funded by taxpayers' money.

I propose ensuring that no public taxes are used for the voluntary pension fund, with its actuarial deficit of EUR 121 million.

Firstly, the actuarial shortfall is continuing to increase, and secondly, I would also like the list of participants in that voluntary pension fund to finally be published.

My third point - a very thorny issue - is the voluntary pension fund, which, at the moment, suffers an actuarial shortage of EUR 28.8 million.

Amendment 11: The EPLP believes that, as the voluntary pension fund is partly paid through public funds, the list of members should be made public.

If he thinks that the Members who belong to the voluntary pension fund should not take part in the vote on the discharge, he would do well to put his own house in order.

Finally, Mr President, I have a question for you: when will Parliament's Secretariat decide to opt for complete transparency and publish the names of all members of Parliament's voluntary pension fund?

This time, I shall confine myself to Parliament's budget and should like to express my delight at Mr Casaca's report, particularly the chapter about the voluntary pension fund, in which we approved 10 paragraphs or so.

The debate about our system of allowances, especially the travel allowance, which has been going on for over a year now, and now, in the Netherlands, about our voluntary pension fund, has a lot to do with this.

The INPS converted the voluntary pension funds, which covered 3% of the total population, into a compulsory system for all employees, effective January 1, 1945, and thus became the first universal social insurance system in Argentina.

As I see it, and so does my delegation, it is of the utmost importance that every impression be avoided that public resources - general cover of expenses - are used for private income, namely to boost the voluntary pension fund.

We can see that action is being taken and that things are being done at our request - such as the intervention in the voluntary pension fund - that were absolutely necessary in order to avert the immediate insolvency of this fund in 2009.

I regret that neither the rapporteur nor the majority of the committee members were inclined to take into consideration the comments of the chairman of the Members' voluntary pension fund in order to eliminate obvious falsehoods relating, among other things, to the statute due to enter into force in 2009.