Search Results for: Bulgarian

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE BULGARIAN government has negotiated the right for its tobacco-growing sector to claim direct farm payments from the European Union (EU) representing 47,137 tonnes of production per annum. European Commission officials have told World Tobacco that the notional quota was part of an agriculture agreement within Bulgaria’s talks on joining the EU, which it is expected to do by January 2007.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
BULGARIAN police – supported by European Union (EU) police agency Europol – have seized and dismantled three major Euro counterfeit currency print shops. More than 400 officers raided dozens of houses across Bulgaria, netting fake banknotes with a face value of Euro 100,000, fake documents, credit cards and counterfeit tourist visas.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
BULGARIA has announced it will build a second nuclear power plant to replace the outdated Kozloduy power station, which the European Union (EU) insists should be closed by 2006. Construction will take place at Belene, in northern Bulgaria where work started on building a 1,000-megawatt plant in 1987, but ceased in 1991 following environmental campaigns.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
WHEN the European Union (EU) signed up to an Agreement on Textiles and Clothing at the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) last Uruguay Round that foresaw the scrapping of import quotas at the start of 2005, it is hard to imagine it viewing the deal as a way to boost production in knitted products.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A SERIES of exemptions from the European Union’s (EU) new energy taxation directive have been proposed by the European Commission for the eastern and southern European countries joining the EU in May (barring Cyprus).

They would be added to the already long list of exemptions negotiated by existing Member States that prompted EU internal market Commissioner Frits Bolkestein to liken the legislation to “Gruyere cheese”.…

KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) has drawn up plans to lend Euro 50 million via Bulgarian banks to finance energy efficiency and small renewable energy projects in the country’s private sector. This money would be combined with an extra Euro 10 million from the Kozloduy International Decomissioning and Support Fund (KIDSF), which was set up to help Bulgaria cope with the loss of power supplies caused by the decommissioning of the Kozloduy nuclear power station.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
EUROPEAN Union (EU) law enforcement agencies are intensifying their fight against the counterfeiting of the Euro currency, as European Central Bank (ECB) figures show an increase in seizures of forged banknotes. In the second half of 2003, 311,925 counterfeit notes were discovered in Euro and non-Euro countries, a 30 per cent increase over the first six months of 2003, when counterfeit seizures had been 59 per cent more numerous than in the previous half-year.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) is helping to fund the construction of a 150 kilometre 400 kV transmission power line that will link the electricity grids of neighbouring Balkan countries Bulgaria and Macedonia. Although 80 kilometres of the electricity cables will be in Bulgaria, the bank’s Euro 40.5 million loan will be paid to Elektrostopanstvo na Makedonija (ESM), Macedonia’s state-owned power utility; Bulgarian electricity provider Natsionalna Elektricheska Kompanija would meet its share of the project’s costs by providing electricity to ESM during construction.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
EUROPEAN Union (EU) energy ministers have agreed new rules for applying value added tax to cross-border gas supplies that will reduce confusion created by increasing cross-border trading in energy supplies. Now, traders re-selling supplies who are not established in the same country as the supplier will pay VAT through an obligatory reverse charge system.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
BULGARIA has informed the World Trade Organisation (WTO) that it has dropped its plans to impose a temporary safeguard duty on imports of flat-rolled products of non-alloy steel plus iron or steel bars and rods. The decision follows an investigation staged by the Bulgarian government.…