Search Results for: France

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 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.”…

Keith Nuthall
THE EUROPEAN Commission has proposed that EU ministers approve an application from France to extend for another seven years the right to reduce the rate of excise duty applied in mainland France to traditional rum from the French overseas departments of Guadeloupe, Martinique, Réunion and Guyane.…

KEITH NUTHALL
MEMBER States of the European Union have been placed under increasing political and legal pressure from both the European Commission and the European Court of Justice to improve the environmental quality of their water supplies.

France, for instance, has lost a long-running case at the ECJ, over its failure to ensure the availability of sufficiently clean drinking water in Brittany.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
LOCAL authorities in the European Union are unprepared for the introduction of single European currency notes and coins next January, even though they have a crucial role in spreading information among small businesses and community groups, the European Commission has claimed.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
BRUSSELS is always looking for big ideas by which it can justify its existence to a doubting public and one of the latest of these is the concept of a European Research Area. This idea is that Europe – with its patchwork of nations and national research units – should coordinate its academics and researchers, making sure that they do not duplicate their efforts, rather dovetailing them with a single European goal in mind.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A LACK of coordination amongst EU Member States’ research teams regarding the study of BSE has been revealed by a new European inventory of previous work and that in progress, collated by the European Commission.

It has highlighted areas where better links between national research programmes is required.…

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.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE GOVERNMENT of Canada has formally made an application to host the ITER international fusion test reactor, at a site near Clarington, Ontario. Ottawa’s move was made in Moscow by its ambassador to Russia, Rod Irwin, in the presence of representatives of other countries involved in the project; it is the first such bid.…

Keith Nuthall
A FRENCH government state aid system for producers of liqueur wines and spirits, funding promotional measures, research, technical support and investment, is under threat, because of a European Court of Justice ruling that it should never have been sanctioned by the European Commission.…