Search Results for: France

Keith Nuthall
FRANCE has been formally requested by the European Commission to scrap safety regulations that force pilots of small aircraft on flights from other EU countries to land at an airport with a customs office or give at least 24 hours notice before take-off.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission and European Court of Justice are shaping up for a conflict over the rights of national governments to hold golden shares in privatised utilities that given them special rights to intervene in shaping their policies, even when they do not own them.…

KEITH NUTHALL
A CONSORTIUM of key European Union players in the solar energy market has launched an ambitious scheme to install 15 million square meters of solar collectors in Europe by 2004, a project for which it hopes to get support from the European Commission.…

KEITH NUTHALL
THE PORTUGUESE government has been ordered to scrap its reduced five per cent rate of VAT on equipment designed for research into alternative forms of energy, with the European Court of Justice ruling that it contravened the EU’s Sixth VAT Directive, which attempts to harmonise the application of sales taxes.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
THE EUROPEAN Commission has sent second warning letters to the UK and seven other EU countries for their failure to adopt an EU directive aimed at providing new car buyers with information about fuel consumption and carbon dioxide emissions.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
FRANCE, Ireland and Spain are to be taken to the European Court of Justice for their failure to recognise professional legal qualifications granted in other EU countries. The European Commission said the countries had not implemented Directive 98/5/EC, which entitles lawyers to practise permanently and without restriction, under their original professional title, in another Member State on the same basis as the host country’s own lawyers.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has called for the closure of EU coalmines that perform poorly economically, where they have been lavished with state aid paid with the view to them being restructured and turned around.

In its latest report on state aid to the mining industry, (for the year 2000), Brussels adopts an aggressively negative tone about aid paid by national governments to the coal industry, which it claims “is in crisis, despite several years of state aid.”…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Union Council of Ministers has agreed to allow yet another Member State to stretch the agreement underlying the new common market organisation in wine, by approving a large national handout for compulsory distillation. In a move that it likely to dismay the European Commission, ministers agreed to allow France to grant exceptional national aid to producers for distillation of 1.5 million hectolitres of wine.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE FRENCH government has been told to bring its statistical systems for measuring the environmental quality of its bathing water into line with EU standards. The European Court of Justice has supported a bid by the European Commission to declare the French system illegal, ordering Paris to pay costs.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
CRIMINALS are still fleecing the European Union’s budget of hundreds-of-millions of Euro, according to the latest European Commission fraud report. But Brussels is refusing to throw in the towel, unveiling more anti-fraud proposals, Keith Nuthall reports.

THE ANNUAL report on the Protection of the Communities’ (EU’s) Financial Interests and the Fight Against Fraud always seems to have been misnamed, in that it usually focuses on how much money the European Union has been losing to fraudsters, rather than saving.…