SPAIN PUNISHED BY EUROPEAN COMMISSION FOR EXCESS VINE PLANTING
April 1st, 2008
BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE SPANISH government has been ordered to repay Euro 54.9 million in European Union (EU) subsidies after the European Commission concluded it had wasted the money on unauthorised planting of vineyards in 2003 and 2004. The expansion broke EU planting controls designed to contract Europe's wine sector into a commercially viable sector focused on quality wines, rather than churning out cheap wine that ends up in compulsory distillation programmes. EU agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel said: "We are working extremely hard to ...
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.