Search Results for: Dominican Republic

BY KEITH NUTHALL
HOLIDAYS and pregnancy leave are a serious business, both for the employees who take them and the employers who pay for them. Unfortunately for personnel departments who might want a little more flexibility over whether they should shell out or not, recent cases at the European Court of Justice have underlined the right of EU citizens to take paid leave, rather than erode them.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has been ordered to conclude wide-ranging research agreements on nuclear energy with the Russian Federation, focusing on general safety within the industry and fusion power generation. Brussels has also been told by EU ministers to strike a deal with Kazakhstan on fusion research.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
EASTERN European countries applying to join the European Union should be given transitional periods to align their excise duties on cigarettes with the laws loosely harmonising those of existing Member States, says the European Commission.

It has formally suggested that Poland, Romania and Slovenia should have two years from the time that they join the EU in which to amend their rates, and that Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Slovakia should have three years’ grace.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
FOREIGN companies will be able to hold 100 per cent ownership in hotels in China by March 2005, under the trade deal which led to Chinese membership of the World Trade Organisation being approved last week. Until now, international hotel groups have had to work with a Chinese partner in formal joint-ventures, as a condition of being able to trade in China.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Union Council of Ministers has imposed definitive anti-dumping duties on imports into the EU of certain steel and iron cables from the Czech Republic, Russia, Turkey and Thailand.

Its decision – by the written procedure used during Brussels’ summer break – follows an inquiry, which “confirmed” concerns that the sale of cut-priced cables from these countries was harming EU producers.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE INTERNATIONAL Chamber of Commerce is claiming the credit for closing down an audacious cyber-scam, the creation of an entirely fictitious country that existed only on the Internet. The problem with the Republic of Port Maria, said the ICC, was that not only did it have its own website, it offered bogus offshore banking services to the unwary.…

KEITH NUTHALL
THE DISMANTLING of the Indonesian price regulator APKINDO and short-termist over-production in the south east Asian country has been blamed by the United Nations as the source of continual instability in world markets for this key timber product. Since the abolition of the organisation, said the new 2000-2001 World Commodity Survey from the UN Conference on Trade and Development, (UNCTAD), “the plywood market has witnessed extremely volatile prices.”…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
MULTILATERAL sea and river organisations are usually created to deal with existing problems that cross national borders, but a new body has been making progress on a shipping issue that has yet even to happen: the exploitation and transport of subterranean solid mineral deposits.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
THE GERMAN government has been told that it must cut back its regional aid for the construction of a new Volkswagen car factory in Dresden to 85 per cent of the sum proposed. The revised aid of 145 million Deutschmarks, (about Pounds 47 million), is part of a total investment of DM 1,000 million for a so-called “transparent factory,” which would allow a customer to observe the final assembly of his vehicle on site.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has proposed that the EU Council of Ministers imposes definitive anti-dumping duties on imports of certain iron or steel ropes and cables from the Czech Republic, (47.1 per cent), Russia, (50.7 per cent), Thailand, (42.8 per cent), and Turkey, (31 per cent).…