Search Results for: european union

BY KEITH NUTHALL
BRITISH and other developed country exporters will be able to take advantage of lower tariffs and abolished restrictive import quotas in the vast markets of China in future, because of the long awaited decision to admit the planet’s fifth largest trading nation to the World Trade Organisation.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Bank for Reconstruction and Development has developed plans to lend US$25 million to develop Atyrau Airport, in western Kazakhstan, near the Caspian Sea. It wants to lend the money to the Atyrau Airport Company, which is wholly owned by KazTransOil, the state oil transport company.…

Keith Nuthall
MEP’s have voted for legal limits to be applied to the content of certain on additives or pollutants in drinking water used for the dilution of commercial fruit juices. In amendments to a proposed fruit juice directive, the European Parliament voted for tight controls on the presence of sodium, calcium, magnesium, potassium, chloride and electrical conductivity in juice water.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
THE SPANISH provinces of Valencia, Cuenca and Teruel have been freed from restrictions on the export of live pigs and porcine semen arising out of classical swine fever, the European Commission has decided. Live pig exports will only be permitted over the next 30 days if they come from CSF-free holdings however.…

KEITH NUTHALL
A EUROPEAN Space Agency-supported satellite ground station has been helping Canadian fire fighters to tackle a spate of large-scale blazes in British Columbia. The

REMSAT unit is driven or flown by helicopter close to a particular fire, establishing a link with satellite cameras, which beam back accurate one-metre resolution images, enabling fire teams to target their work, including the mapping of blaze perimeters.…

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.…

Keith Nuthall
EUROPEAN bed linen manufacturers have been given six months to request the imposition of renewed anti-dumping duties on cut-priced imports from India, after the European Commission complied with a WTO ruling on the protection and suspended existing tariffs. Geneva had claimed that Brussels had wrongly calculated the duties and EU trade commissioner Pascal Lamy has now ruled that there is currently insufficient information on which to base a fresh assessment leading to an immediate re-imposition of the duties.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE TIMING of concessions that can be achieved at the World Trade Organisation’s agricultural round, sweeping away the high tariffs, import quotas, production subsidies and export credits that make the working lives of every agricultural exporter more of a struggle, are likely to be set in the next three months.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has approved the spending of Euro 119.2 million, (Pounds 74.71 million), of EU grants on rural development programmes in England from 2001 to 2006. Money is to be funnelled from the EU’s Leader Plus initiative via 23 Local Action Groups, which are to be selected by the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.…

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.…