FRANCE AND PORTUGAL

BY KEITH NUTHALLTHE EUROPEAN Union Council of Ministers has approved an application from France to extend for another seven years its right to reduce by up to half the rate of excise duty applied in mainland France to traditional rum from the French Caribbean and Indian Ocean departments of Guadeloupe, Martinique, Réunion and Guyane. The existing permission officially expired at the end of last year, but ministers have accepted Paris' wishes for the exemption run until December 2009. The rate may not be less than 50 per cent of the standard national duty on ...


Full access to this article can be arranged with permission from the client that first ordered it. Please contact us to request access. Entries are uploaded to our archive at least one year after being published by a client – free access is restricted to International News Services journalists for background research only. The article date indicates when copy was filed to a client, not when posted to this archive. Upon client requests, International News Services will remove such articles from the archive or not upload them in the first place. They are included to demonstrate the breadth of topics undertaken by the agency and also to help promote clients’ coverage.