Search Results for: German

BY KEITH NUTHALL
PRACTICAL advice on how local authorities can cope with the growing threats posed by floods and droughts have been included in a new report from the European Environment Agency, which claims that flooding is “the most common and most costly type of natural disaster in Europe.”…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
COMPETITION officials are examining a proposed German joint-venture merging the downstream and petrochemical operations of Deutsche Shell GmbH and its rival RWE-DEA. The German Competition Authority has been given the right to adjudicate on the downstream elements by the European Commission, which is itself handling the deal’s petrochemical implications.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
BOOK club companies must pay value added tax on the costs of delivering gifts in kind to existing customers as a reward for bringing in new business, the European Court of Justice has ruled. The judgement came in a case involving clubs operated by the German media giant Bertelsmann between 1985 and 1990 when books, records and bicycles were given to subscribers in return for the introduction of new members.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
THE GERMAN travel firm Preussag has been cleared by the European

Commission to take full control of the Belgian subsidiary of the TUI

group which it had had previously shared with the Belgian firm Imobra. TUI Belgium controls the tour operator Jet Air.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
GERMAN chemicals giant BASF has been frustrated in its bid to secure a new supplementary protection certificate for its longstanding pesticide ingredient chloridazon, which would have erected fresh legal barriers for rivals wanting to use the chemical.

The company had applied for the certificate at the Dutch Industrial Property Office, on the basis of a comparatively new market approval, secured for a chloridazon product in 1987, (the first had been issued in 1967).…

BY ALAN OSBORN
WILL there come a day when a genuine European market in health care takes its place among the other landmark achievements of the European Union?

In terms of economic efficiency and the functioning of the internal market, does it make much sense for a million patients in Britain, say, to have to wait sometimes for a year or more for important operations while people in France or Luxembourg can book them for the next day and some German hospitals have barely half their beds filled?…

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.…

Keith Nuthall
THE EUROPEAN Commission has launched a formal state aid investigation into payments from the German government of Euro 7.83 million, which were paid to bankrupt Saxony textile company Erba Lautex GmbH and its successor Neue Erba Lautex GmbH.

Brussels is also taking Germany to the European Court of Justice, alleging that it ignored a previous order, banning the payment of Euro 61.36 million to Erba Lautex.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has ordered American medicines information company IMS HEALTH (IMS) to abandon its refusal to allow rivals to copy its pharmaceutical sales and prescriptions data collection system in Germany.

In an unusual step, Brussels has used its powers as a competition authority to tell IMS to immediately licence the use of its 1860 brick structure method, over which it has copyright, “on commercial terms.”…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
MEP’s have backed moves to introduce EU pollution controls for ‘non-road mobile machinery,’ such as lawn mowers, hedge trimmers, chain saws and forestry equipment, although the European Parliament’s environment committee has baulked at proposals to grant concessions to large manufacturers.…