Search Results for: european union

BY KEITH NUTHALL
TOUGH restrictions applied by the Austrian and Swedish governments on the use of cadmium in their territories are likely to be scrapped, after the European Court of Justice ruled that amendments to EU legislation permitting them to retain these rules were actually illegal.…

Keith Nuthall
THE EUROPEAN Commission has ordered the Dutch government recover maritime transport aid it has paid out since 1996 to port and inland waterway towage operations, ruling that these payments broke EU state aid rules. Brussels approved subsidies from the Netherlands to towage operators, but had assumed that this money was for limited to ships working on the open seas.…

KEITH NUTHALL
SPINOFF technology from the European Space Agency has been used to create knitted steel flameproof textiles, which have been designed to protect the outside of road haulage containers from vandals. French company Société Ariégeoise de Bonneterie has adapted materials used on ESA’s Ariane rocket launchers, modifying the knitting technique to create a flexible fabric of steel wire that is extremely difficult to cut.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
MINISTERS of the 15 European Union countries have reached agreement on the Trans-European Energy Networks directive. The ministers have essentially supported the Commission proposal of last year and Brussels officials predicted that the European Parliament will do likewise later this year.…

Keith Nuthall
THE EUROPEAN Union Council of Ministers has been censured by the European Ombudsman, Jacob Söderman, who has called on EU Member States to reconsider their refusal to release a report on business taxation to a firm of consultants, (which has chosen to remain anonymous).…

BY ALAN OSBORN AND PHILIP FINE

THE EUROPEAN Commission’s competition authority has cleared the purchase

by General Motors of a series of production and sales outlets of the South

Korean car manufacturer Daewoo.

GM is to acquire some of Daewoo’s production facilities for passenger cars

and light commercial vehicles in Korea and Vietnam together with sales

subsidiaries in Austria, the Benelux region, (Belgium, Netherlands and

Luxembourg), France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Switzerland.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Union Council of Ministers has approved in principle the passage of a directive on “occurrence reporting in civil aviation,” which will provide for the circulation of information about near misses amongst Member States.

This law will now be passed to the European Parliament, for its first reading; it would tell governments to draw up mandatory and confidential reports on incidents, defects and malfunctions which may constitute a hazard for civil aviation.…

KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has proposed he creation of a new Euro 13 million per annum scheme to monitor the health of Europe’s forests. Assuming it is approved by European Union ministers, the programme would initially run from January 2003 until December 2008.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
THE EUROPEAN Commission has approved the development of an international utility Internet service, which will allow water companies to reduce their procurement costs by calling in bids from a wide range of suppliers.

Ondeo Nalco, a subsidiary of the French group Suez, and RWE’s Thames Water are co-operating to form a joint-venture that will offer electronic procurement, as well as information and bid management services to companies in water-related sectors.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A BID by Northumbrian Water to comply with the European Union’s revised drinking water and urban wastewater treatment directives could net the utility up to Pounds 100 million in loans from the European Investment Bank. Its officials are considering funding a number of water supply and wastewater schemes throughout Northumbrian’s northern England service area.…