Search Results for: Romanian

European Union (EU) governments will be asked to stop levying more taxes on their steel manufacturers in an EU steel action plan to be presented on June 11, Steel First can reveal. Romania’s economy minister Varujan Vosganian, an EU minister closely involved in drafting the policy has outlined a series of details to be written into the text.…

ROMANIA might have been a European Union (EU) member state since 2007, but it is still dogged by allegations that it is a home for corruption and its performance in fighting graft continues to be formally monitored by the European Commission.…

ROMANIAN President Traian Basescu has asked the country’s prime minister to sack two ministers facing graft charges until April 30 so the country can be accepted as a member of the European Union’s (EU) in the Schengen passport-free zone by the end of the year.…

ROMANIA’S accounting and tax processes are about to come under spotlight after the country joined the Organisation for European Cooperation & Development (OECD) global forum on transparency and exchange of information for tax purposes at the end of January. It could be a rough rise for a country whose corruption failings are still being assessed by a special European Commission review, even though it joined the European Union (EU) as long ago as 2007.…

PROFITS from human trafficking are estimated at USD32 billion-a-year and growing, according to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), with the trade one of the fastest growing international crimes, now second to the drugs trade and ahead of arms trafficking. But despite its emotive nature as a crime, only recently has the money laundering angle to human trafficking been taken more seriously, and there is still a way to go.…

THE EUROPEAN Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has declared it is ready to investigate the contamination of beef products with horsemeat, because it raises issues of false labelling, food quality and traceability in the European Union (EU) food chain. Although there is no evidence at the moment of any food safety issues, risk managers from EU countries are already conducting extensive tests of meat products to assess their components.…

BY MARK ROWE AND CARMEN PAUN

AMIDST the fanfare that greeted Romania and Bulgaria’s accession to the European Union, there was little expectation that membership would eradicate corruption overnight. There were, though, reasonable grounds for anticipating tangible progress. Five years on, major corruption scrutiny bodies appear to have come to just such a conclusion: that Bulgaria at least has made substantial efforts to clean out some of the worst elements of corruption, but has plenty left to do.…

BY CARMEN PAUN

TWO Romanian banks have been hit by staff issuing EUR85 million fraudulent loans to customers who should never have qualified for financing, the country’s directorate for the investigation of organised crime and terrorism (DIICOT) has revealed. The banks are BRD, controlled by France’s Société Générale, and Volksbank, part of the identically named Austrian group.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

PRESSURE is growing on European Union (EU) ministers to give the EU’s sugar production quota system a stay of execution. MEPs on the European Parliament’s agriculture committee have called for the retention of EU sugar quotas for beet farmers until 2020, rather than follow existing plans to phase them out in 2015.…

BY CARMEN PAUN AND KEITH NUTHALL

ROMANIA’S Prime Minister Victor Ponta has been accused of plagiarising his PhD (ironically on the International Criminal Court) by two senior academic bodies. First, the Romanian National Council for Attesting Titles, Diplomas and University Certificates (CNATDCU) ruled on June 29 that the PM copied part of his 2003 thesis – and it was dismantled by the ministry of education that same day.…