Search Results for: Austria

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE EUROPEAN Commission has taken another step to prevent the levying of VAT on car registration taxes charged within a package price by automobile dealers, telling Austria, Finland and Malta to stop this double taxation. It has threatened legal action if it is not obeyed.…

BY DAVID HAWORTH, in Brussels

THE FÉDÉRATION Internationale de l’Automobile has warned road accident fatalities in 2007 rose in some European countries compared with 2006. These included the Czech Republic (up 17 %), Denmark (+33 %), Finland (+13 %), Slovenia (+12 %) and Sweden (+6%).…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE EUROPEAN Parliament’s economics committee has called for the European Union’s (EU) minimum rate of excise duty on diesel to be raised to that for unleaded petrol: from the current Euro 302/1,000 litres to Euro 359/1,000 litres by 2015, with Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Bulgaria and Romania having until 2016.…

BY DAVID HAWORTH, in Brussels

THE DEVELOPMENT of university autonomy in Europe is a prerequisite for getting more funds from private and public sources concluded a European University Association (EUA) two-day conference in Brussels last week. Whilst technical finance issues were dominant in the discussions by 120 education experts from 30 different countries, autonomy was a recurring issue at the conference.…

BY DAVID HAWORTH, in Brussels

THE HUGE diversity of higher education institutional funding systems across the 27 countries of the European Union (EU) was cited as one of the main difficulties facing universities, heard the recent European University Association conference on the sector’s finances.…

BY MARK ROWE

THE ANNOUNCEMENT by the UK government that it intends to build a new generation of nuclear power plants stands out, not just because of the scale of the proposals, but because it is the first such comprehensive initiative in Europe for some years.…

BY CHRIS JONES, in Brussels

VIVIANE Reding is clearly a woman who is proud of her achievements. The walls of her plush, 12th-floor office in the European Commission’s headquarters in Brussels are festooned with certificates and awards, including at least two honorary doctorates and several accolades reflecting the European Union (EU) media commissioner’s lengthy career in European politics.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

HEAVIER vehicles such as SUVs and luxury models will be able to breach a proposed European Union (EU) carbon dioxide cap, under formally proposed legislation now tabled by the European Commission. Pressure from German manufacturers forced Brussels into abandoning an absolute cap for all new models of 130 grams of CO2 per kilometre.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE EUROPEAN Commission has been approving a series of operational programmes for many European Union (EU) member states’ fishing (and aquaculture) sectors, outlining how it will target money from the European Fisheries Fund (EFF).

One of the largest recipients of this Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) subsidy scheme is France, which is to receive Euro 216 million from 2007-13, less than it received under the 2000-2006 Financial Instrument for Fisheries Guidance (FIFG), which supplied Euro 278 million.…

BY PAUL COCHRANE, in Tripoli and Beirut

THE OPENING up of Libya’s economy could not have come at a better time for international oil companies, which have been beset in recent years by dwindling easily accessible oil reserves, tighter controls over exploration rights and extraction, and heightened security concerns.…