Search Results for: Spanish

KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has taken an important step towards giving EU water legislation more teeth, by moving against Belgium’s system of “tacit approvals” of pollution. Belgian law allows companies to assume that they have a right to pollute if they make an application to regulators and then receive no reply.…

KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Court of Justice has cleared the way for Spain to restart subsidising investments by its hauliers into buying or hire-purchasing new lorries and vans.

Annulling a decision made by the European Commission in 1998 that blocked Madrid from helping haulage operators pay the interest on loans they raise for new vehicles, judges said Brussels was wrong to brand these payments as illegal state aid.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
THE SPANISH company Logista, a wholesale distributor of tobacco in Spain and Portugal, is to take joint control of Logesta Gestion de Transporte in a move that will extend Logista’s activities into freight forwarding. The European Commission has approved a deal under which Logista will share control with another Spanish company, Gestcamp, which operates in the warehousing sector among others.…

Keith Nuthall
THE EUROPEAN Commission has made it clear that it will not countenance the creation of certain special tax regimes within the European Union for so-called coordination centres, that provide services including banking, marketing, insurance and logistics to companies within an international group.…

BY DEIRDRE MASON
THE ROMANO Prodi-led European Commission has received a mid-term report from senior environmental groups within the European Union and it contains a mixture of bouquets and brickbats. It written by the Green 8, a coalition that includes the European Environmental Bureau, the European Federation for Transport and Environment and Friends of the Earth Europe.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
THE EUROPEAN Commission has given the green light to a proposed joint venture between the Spanish companies, Canal de Isabel II and Hidroeléctrica del Cantábrico which will develop power supplies in Madrid, including generation, distribution and supply. Water services company Canal already provides electricity services in Madrid through its subsidiary Hidráulica de Santillana, while power company Hidroeléctrica’s base is in Asturias, in northern Spain.…

BY MARK ROWE
CAN the European Union’s single skies plan become a reality inside 30 months? It is a topical subject, with the recent crash over Germany underlining the arguments in favour and against the project, which should lead to planes flying above 28,000 feet being guided and controlled by unified units of air traffic controllers, replacing the current piecemeal system of national flight monitoring and guidance.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
REVERSING its earlier position, the European Commission has agreed that the German grid feed-in laws on the promotion of electricity from renewable energy sources and from combined heat and power do not constitute state aid, that Brussels could, in theory, ban.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has ordered the Spanish government to recover “billions of Pesatas” in state aid that it claims Madrid illegally paid porcelain manufacturer Grupo de Empresas Álvarez, (GEA), in Vigo, Galicia, although it has asked the Spaniards to work out exactly how much money is involved.…

Keith Nuthall
THE EUROPEAN Commission has pared back regional aid earmarked by the Spanish government to invest in Ford España’s Almusafes (Valencia) plant, ruling that Madrid should spend only Euro 11.11 million, rather than the Euro 15.74 million originally planned. The money will help the plant produce a new engine, the I4, that will power cars like the Focus and the Mondeo from 2003 onwards.…