Archive

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE BELGIAN government has been put on legal notice by the European Commission that it could be heavily fined by the European Court of Justice for its failure to abide by rulings made in 1999 opposing Belgium’s cargo sharing shipping deals with five African countries, namely Togo, Mali, Senegal, the Ivory Coast and its former colony, the Democratic Republic of the Congo.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
The European Commission announced today (Thursday) that after three days of intensive negotiations an “historic” agreement has been reached with China on maritime transport. The deal is based “on the principles of freedom to provide services, free access to cargoes, and cross-trades, unrestricted access to an non-discriminatory treatment in the use of ports,” said the Commission.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A FINAL deal has at last been struck over the extension of the European Union’s working time rules to the road transport sector; a conciliation committee representing both the European Parliament and the EU Council of Ministers have reached agreement over the outstanding issues, notably that of self-employed drivers.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
THE FUTURE of the European Union’s ambitious Galileo project remains in the balance after heads of government, in their summit meeting in Belgium at the weekend, re-affirmed the “strategic importance” they attach to it. The summit called on ministers “to continue work with a view to taking a decision on the funding of the development phase by March 2002 and to decide on the regulation by June 2002.”…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
European Union transport ministers have dealt a heavy, and possibly fatal, blow to the EU’s Galileo global positioning project by refusing to provide finance for the crucial development stage of the programme. The 3.6 billion euro (pounds 2.2 billion) Galileo scheme is designed to establish a satellite-based tracking system that, when operative in 2008, will allow transport operators and others to pinpoint positions on earth and reduce dependence on the American GPS navigation system which is shared with military users and where signals to civilian operators cannot be guaranteed.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A new report by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) on conditions in the world shipping and shipbuilding industries makes grim reading. Clearly things were bad well before the attack on the World Trade Centre and the fundamentals have worsened since.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
AN ITALIAN state aid scheme designed to help the European Union achieve one of its key post-Erika disaster objectives – the phasing out of old single hull oil tankers – could be blocked by the European Commission, on the grounds that it is too generous.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
The European Commission is now re-thinking its strategy over ship-building following rejection of its favoured approach by the EU Council of Industry Ministers on Wednesday.

Mr Heinz Mico, a spokesman for the trade commissioner Pascal Lamy, said the extension of the EU’s case at the WTO to include LNG carriers would only be realistic if there were “good reasons” for it that went beyond the complaint of one country.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has approved the payment by the British government of Euro 80 million in additional state aid to boost the movement of freight through the Scottish port of Rosyth, in a bid to boost the country’s short sea shipping sector.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Court of Justice has ruled that an EU national government cannot insist that waste shipments to another Member State are disposed of in an environmentally-friendly way, as a condition of allowing a cargo to leave its territory.…