Search Results for: International business

Keith Nuthall
A GLOBAL questionnaire has been launched by the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law, (UNCITRAL), which wants to kick start efforts to create a UN convention on insurance liability during multi-modal transportation.

The UN agency has pointed out that despite the huge growth in container movements (from zero in 1965 to 225.3 million in 2000), there is still no global set of rules governing responsibility for cargo carried by combined transport involving ships, rail and roads.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
PHANTOM ships may become less common on the high seas because of a Commonwealth-based law dating back to 1906, that was recently invoked for the first time in a Hong Kong court.

Section 44 of the Chinese territory’s Marine Insurance Act (MIA) says that a theft liability risk does not attach to a ship’s cargo if the ship’s managers had no intention from the outset of sailing to an agreed destination; it was used to defeat insurance claims made against mainland-China based and state-owned defendant China Insurance Company Limited by the owner of missing cargo worth US$2.5 million aboard the merchant vessel, the Pacifica.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has published a list of exported American print industry products that could be saddled with protective duties of up to 100 per cent, because of a World Trade Organisation ruling allowing Brussels to retaliate against the US’s use of foreign trade corporations to give its exporters illegal tax breaks.…

BY MATT WELLS, in New York
A NEW survey of business leaders in the United States carried out by the security professionals’ organisation ASIS International, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and the US Chamber of Commerce has indicated that around US$59 billion dollars-worth of intellectual property and information were stolen in America over the year to last June.…

BY MARK ROWE
ENVIRONMENTAL organisations and an American local authority have issued a lawsuit against the US government for its contribution to global warming, a move that may have important repercussions for the insurance industry.

A lawsuit filed in the US District Court in San Francisco claims that two American export credit agencies illegally provided US$32billion in financing for oil fields, pipelines and coal-fired power plants over the past 10 years without assessing their contribution to global warming.…

BY SWINEETHA DIAS WICKRAMANAYAKA, in Columbo
PUBLIC protests have broken out in Sri Lanka against the Bandaranaike International Airport expansion project, which would evict more than 10,000 families living in and around the Kurana, Katunayake and Katana areas. Campaigners fighting the project were once supported by the ruling United National Party when it was in opposition, but it switched policies after winning last year’s election.…

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
POLITICAL agreement has been reached at the European Union’s Council of Ministers over a proposed harmonisation of national accounting laws for businesses that do not yet have to apply International Accounting Standards. National governments are keen to see the proposal swiftly become law and have forwarded their common position to the European Parliament with a request that it approves the proposed directive “at the earliest possible opportunity.”…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE RICHES that can be made from the illegal ivory trade are well known, but what of illicit imports and exports of rare flowers. Shipping protected orchids to Europe, Japan and north America can make criminals a lot of money.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A EUROPEAN Union directive, regulating insurance mediators, such as brokers, has been approved by the EU Council of Ministers and will come into force as soon as procedural steps are taken.

The insurance mediation directive will allow brokers, banks and car dealers selling policies to trade across the EU by registering in their home Member State.…