By Emmanuel Jarry

PARIS, Jan 3 (Reuters) Nearly half of French donations for victims of the 2004 Asian tsunami remained unspent 12 months ago and should be allocated to other charitable causes, France's top watchdog on public spending said today.

The Cour des Comptes' report found that nearly half of 323 million euros aid gathered from public and private donors had not been used by December 31, 2005.

It explained the unspent funds on the sheer volume of donations to non-government organisations.

''The problem generally met by the NGOs was not a problem of financing projects, it was a problem of using abundant, even overabundant resources,'' the report said.

''The organisations spent little during the emergency phase, they later met numerous difficulties in implementing their reconstruction and redevelopment projects,'' it said.

Last month the World Bank said that about 60 per cent of 600 million dollars tsunami aid it was administering for two Indonesian provinces had not been spent, adding that this rate of expenditure was fast compared to past natural disasters.

The Cour des Comptes said the level of unspent French funds, at 149.6 million euros, was ''not abnormal'' given the mass of donations but it said money could be used for other purposes.

''Reassigning funds, as long as it is done transparently, should be encouraged,'' the Cour des Comptes' president Philippe Seguin said at the presentation of the report.

Donors would have to be consulted before donations were switched to another purpose but the Cour des Comptes noted that where this had been done in the past the response had rarely been negative.

Aid groups in France, like their equivalents in many other countries, were almost overwhelmed by the donations that poured in following the tsunami on December 26, 2004, which killed some 230,000 people across southeast Asia.

Several said at the time the volume of help for the tsunami victims risked depriving other less prominent relief projects of funds and at least one even turned down donations.

''No disaster has ever touched world opinion to the same extent, no disaster has ever raised so much money,'' Seguin said.

''We found ourselves in a situation we have never seen before: an excess of funding in relation to immediate humanitarian needs,'' he said.

The 32 NGOs under examination, including the Red Cross, Secours Catholique and Medecins sans Frontieres, gathered around 289 million euros from private donors and companies. Another 34 million came from sources like the government and European Union.

In the case of the French Red Cross some 85 percent of the total was unused at the end of 2005.

REUTERS PB HT2204