Archive

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE WORLD Bank is developing a Regional Integration Assistance Strategy to remove obstacles to trade within six central African countries that would particularly promote commerce in the area’s rich metal reserves. Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon would benefit from five years of support, leading to road construction and improvement, the modernisation and integration of the financial sector, and by speeding ports and customs transactions.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
FIGURES released from the European Central Bank showing that counterfeiters have begun to get to grips with the freshly minted Euro, supposedly the currency with the largest number of security features ever printed. In the first six months of 2002, only 21,965 counterfeits discovered, however, the bank has reported that the number of counterfeit Euro banknotes removed from circulation rose to 145,153 in the second half of 2002.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Union Council of Ministers have appointed the European Commission as the long term guardian of the goals and assets of the new defunct European Coal and Steel Community. It has been given control of any resources remaining after the winding up of the institution and has been ordered to manage these assets “as to ensure a long-term return….aimed…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Union (EU) Council of Ministers has given the European Commission the authority to collate statistics on imports of hard coal into the EU. Member States will have to provide the information, which will include data on import prices of coal intended for power production and for use in the steel industry.…

BY RICHARD HURST
SOUTH Africa’s largest steel producer, Iscor, has given its former sister company, Kumba Resource, notice that it would like to participate in any of its expansion plans, as the ferrous giant fears it may begin running short of iron-ore supplies from next year.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has proposed that anti-dumping duties levied on imports of ferro-silico-manganese from China and the Ukraine should be reduced when consignments of the metal have lost value from damage incurred before being admitted into the European Union (EU).…

BY MATTHEW BRACE
AUSTRALIA’S Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) for Clean Power from Lignite is developing a system for heating and squeezing coal that will cut the need for extra energy to evaporate water content in this much maligned fuel by up to 90 per cent.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has authorised the Spanish government to pay out industry-wide state aid totalling Euro 425 million covering expenses incurred by the country’s coal industry from July 24 to December 31, 2002, and additional aid of Euro 11.2 million for 2001 and 2002 until July 23.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
AN INQUIRY into whether national state aid paid to Spanish coal mining company González y Díez was illegal under European rules is to be reopened, seven months after the European Commission ruled on the case. Last July 2, it decided that under the now defunct regulations of the former European Coal and Steel Community that the Spanish government should recover state aid paid to the company between1998 and 2000 and should not pay aid earmarked to cover 2001 costs.…

BY SWINEETHA DIAS WICKRAMANAYAKA
INDIA’S Venkatesh Coke and Power Ltd. has announced that it has secured a sales contract for selling coke to Germany’s RAG from its planned 110MW power station in Trincomalee, Sri Lanka, which will import 1.2 million tonnes of coking coal per year, mostly low ash coal from Australia.…