Search Results for: Belgium

BY KEITH NUTHALL
GOVERNMENTS and international organisations have highlighted tobacco smuggling as one of the largest illegal drains on their tax revenues. An international conference has brought law enforcement professionals together with health officials to fight this problem. Keith Nuthall reports.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
NOT many items of legislation from Brussels have provoked quite such anger among farmers over the years as the nitrates directive, which seeks to protect water from nitrate pollution caused by the application of organic and inorganic fertilisers to agricultural land.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
Belgium may be charged in the European Court of Justice unless it changes its legislation on the imposition of tobacco excise duties within two months, the European Commission said today (Monday).

The complaint is over the Belgian practice of demanding payment of excise duties at the time a “fiscal mark” is issued and not when the products are released for consumption, as laid down in EU regulations.…

BY ALAN OSBORN AND PHILIP FINE

THE EUROPEAN Commission’s competition authority has cleared the purchase

by General Motors of a series of production and sales outlets of the South

Korean car manufacturer Daewoo.

GM is to acquire some of Daewoo’s production facilities for passenger cars

and light commercial vehicles in Korea and Vietnam together with sales

subsidiaries in Austria, the Benelux region, (Belgium, Netherlands and

Luxembourg), France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Switzerland.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
MINISTERS of the 15 European Union countries have reached agreement on the Trans-European Energy Networks directive. The ministers have essentially supported the Commission proposal of last year and Brussels officials predicted that the European Parliament will do likewise later this year.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
THE EUROPEAN Commission has filed an appeal against the dismissal of its cigarette smuggling action in the US against three tobacco companies: Philip Morris, R. J. Reynolds and Japan Tobacco. Notably, it has received formal support in the proceedings from the US Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association for its action, along with the World Health Organisation, the US Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.…

BY MARK ROWE
CAN the European Union’s single skies plan become a reality inside 30 months? It is a topical subject, with the recent crash over Germany underlining the arguments in favour and against the project, which should lead to planes flying above 28,000 feet being guided and controlled by unified units of air traffic controllers, replacing the current piecemeal system of national flight monitoring and guidance.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE BELGIAN government has been ordered by the European Court of Justice to bring its health and safety laws in line with the 1990 Euratom directive on the operational protection of outside workers exposed to the risk of ionising radiation during their activities in controlled areas.…

BY DEIRDRE MASON
EASTERN European countries that built nuclear power plants while under the communist system never thought they would face deadlines for closing them down as a prerequisite for joining the European Union. Neither had they built in the next stage – decommissioning – into the prices charged for electricity in the way that the western European nuclear plant operators had done from the start.…

KEITH NUTHALL
A DYNAMIC online forum on European energy policy has been launched by an international consortium; the European Union-funded INTUSER website contains information about current energy issues and questionnaires allowing specialists and the public to contribute to policy debates. The three year project’s website includes special sections on alternative, renewable, fossil and nuclear energy.…