Search Results for: World Trade Organisation

BY ALAN OSBORN
*Finland is the world’s most “honest” country according to Transparency International;

*New British laws will ban payments made to people just for performing their official duties;

*In countries where bribery of foreign officials is a crime, penalties range from a one-year jail sentence (Norway) to life imprisonment (South Africa);

*Half the countries replying to the UN said their legal systems did not make it impossible to obtain tax benefits for foreign payments that would constitute bribery;

*Under American law companies can make payments for “routine government action” such as obtaining licences and permits abroad.…

BY SWINEETHA DIAS WICKRAMANAYAKA
CHINESE sports footwear giant Yue Yuen (Industrial) Holdings Ltd has said that it expects to score around nine per cent sales growth this year as US consumers, the biggest buyers of athletics shoes, return to the shops in the improving economic climate.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
THE SASKATCHEWAN provincial government in Canada has recently passed a restrictive act that prohibits the advertising and displaying of tobacco products in retail outlets where people under the age of eighteen are allowed on the premises.

Shopkeepers are forced to hide cigarettes from patrons by enclosing them in non- transparent cabinets, behind curtains or blinds or selling them from under the counter.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
THE EUROPEAN Commission has been attacked for displaying “aggressive and unnecessary behaviour” against the tobacco industry after it announced that it intended to pursue its “smuggling” case against Philip Morris, RJ Reynolds and others in New York after the American court rejected the case on jurisdictional grounds.…

KEITH NUTHALL
THE WORLD Bank is lending US$93.9 million to fund a China Sustainable Forestry Development Project, which aims to protect some of China’s most important remaining old-growth natural forests and associated biodiversity. The money will help protect vital watersheds and reduce the risk of downstream flooding, while ensuring wood supplies can meet the country’s growing demand for timber.…

BY SWINEETHA DIAS WICKRAMANAYAKA
AN INDIAN cobbler wants a place in the Guinness Book of Records, after creating what he claims is the world’s largest pair of shoes. At 3.71 metres and 1.13 metres wide, James Syiemiong is unlikely to find a customer, unless a yeti moves from the Himalayas to his home-district Shillong, in Meghalaya, south of Assam.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
THE EUROPEAN Commission is demanding that the French public coal corporation Charbonnages de France repay Euro 20 million, (Pounds 12 million), of aid granted between 1994 and 1997 to its government’s central treasury even though Brussels had originally authorised the payments.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
THE EUROPEAN Commission is “continuously monitoring” developments involving the accountancy firm Andersen following the collapse of the proposed merger between the firm’s non-American operations and those of KPMG, officials have told Accountancy Age.

Brussels is concerned about the implications if Andersen’s practices are picked up piecemeal by local or international firms; if parts of Andersen were sold off to other major accountancy

firms on a local basis this “could justify an inquiry” but each case would be judged on its own merits, the official said.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
AUSTRALIAN scientists have produced what they call the world’s first virtual tour of a stretch of ocean floor, an invention that could provide undersea mining prospectors with valuable geological and topographical information.

The 3D map covers 2 million sq km of the 11 million sq km of ocean over which Australia has sovereign rights, off the island continent’s south east shores.…

KEITH NUTHALL
THE INTERNATIONAL Finance Corporation, the private sector arm of the World Bank, is lending US$250,000 to help establish a joint stock company owned by Tajik cotton farmers that will help increase yields and reduce debt. The new company, Sugd Agro Serv, will be unique in Tajikistan and will try to overcome key difficulties, such scarce technical assistance and equipment maintenance.…