Search Results for: Romanian

BY KEITH NUTHALL
ROMANIA’S Ministry of Public Works, Transports and Housing has launched a seaworthiness review of all Romanian flagged ships, which it hopes will allow it to provisionally close its European Union accession negotiations regarding transport policy. The inquiry was sparked by the Prestige disaster off Spain and the resulting release of a blacklist by the European Commission of ships that had visited European Union ports with safety defects.…

KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) has drawn up plans to lend Romanian Industrial Energy Efficiency Company Euro 11 million, so it can help around 15 creditworthy industrial companies develop “more efficient and reliable sources of energy,” especially by using co-generation.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
SWITZERLAND has complained to a key World Trade Organisation committee that its beef imports are being unfairly restricted by the USA because of concerns that they are contaminated with BSE. It has claimed at the WTO Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures Committee that the US should not, for example, be insisting on the onsite inspection of Swiss meat plants, because the Office International des Épizooties has classified Switzerland as having a low incidence the disease.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A LAPSED double-checking system for imports of Romanian steel products into the European Union is to be reinstated from July, assuming EU ministers approve a proposal from the European Commission. The system was established when Romania and the EU signed an association agreement, (a broad trade and political relations deal), in 1996, but its legal authority lapsed last December.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
INTERNATIONAL financial assistance is required in the eastern European shipbuilding and repair industries, if they are to withstand increased competition following the planned entry of their countries to the European Union, a report ordered by the European Commission has concluded.…

Keith Nuthall
POLAND has refused to accept a recommendation from the Textiles Monitoring Bureau of the World Trade Organisation that it lift transitional safeguard duties imposed on imports of acrylic/modacrylic staple yarn, pure or mixed with wool or fine animal hair, from Romania.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
CYNICS may look at the hastening political process of allowing eastern European countries, and their large agricultural sectors, into the European Union, and ask, ‘what’s in it for us?’

It’s a good question given that the 10 countries that are at the front of the membership queue, (with the tiny exceptions of Malta and Cyprus), are hardly wealthy.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE PROCESS of transforming the European Union’s anti-fraud office OLAF into a truly independent operator, with enough investigative muscle and legislative teeth to make an impact in Brussels’ fight against financial crime, has proved to be a slow and difficult task, its latest report admits.…