Search Results for: Austria

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) is making its largest ever loan to the leasing sector in Russia, lending US$150 million to Austria’s Raiffeisen-Leasing for on-lending to Russian businesses. Transport leasing is one of four sectors prioritised in this loan package, designed to “encourage competition in the sector and spread leasing beyond Moscow and St Petersburg”, said an EBRD note.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
REPRESENTATIVES of 40 governments have heard how space technology can be used to boost drinking water quality worldwide. A conference organised by the Vienna-based United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs heard how satellites can aid groundwater monitoring, flood predictions, lake and river water movement assessments, and other key tasks.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
AFTER 30 years of discussions, a European Union (EU) Company Statute is now in place, allowing the creation of European holding companies, joint subsidiaries or merged operations, theoretically able to work seamlessly in at least two member states.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
DIESEL vehicle owners are undermining the efforts of manufacturers to reduce road transport pollution in Europe, a European Environment Agency (EEA) report has claimed, by tuning engines to boost their power. The EEA thinks up to 50% of new diesel vehicles are being modified and that such changes can increase emissions, especially of harmful particles, by as much as three times.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE OPPORTINITY for companies to buy efficient robots to tackle unpopular or dangerous jobs is increasing fast, with orders for industrial robots rising by 18% worldwide January-June this year, a United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) report has said.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
BRITAIN’S performance in reducing heart disease deaths could be much improved compared with many of its European Union (EU) partners, a new World Health Organisation heart disease atlas, has shown.

Dividing a country’s annual deaths from heart disease with its population, saturated fats and beer loving Britain had a comparative factor of 2, based on 120,530 deaths in 2002 amongst a population of 59 million.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
IT might be one of the world’s smallest countries but you could hardly ask for a more emphatic turnaround from villain to hero in the fight against money laundering than Liechtenstein has managed over the last five years.…

Keith Nuthall
THE EUROPEAN Commission is threatening to ask the European Court of Justice to levy daily recurring fines of Euro 1,000’s against eight European Union (EU) member countries failing to scrap bilateral ‘open skies’; deals with the USA. Despite being so ordered 18 months ago, Austria, Belgium, Britain, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Luxembourg and Sweden have maintained their agreements while the Commission negotiates an EU-wide replacement.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Union (EU) could expand restrictions on the sale of jelly mini-cups, the gelatinous confectionary blamed for causing dangerous choking in young people. This follows advice from the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) that any mini-cup made with a gel-forming additive “could cause choking and not just in children”.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
POCA also contains “freestanding” reporting obligations. At present, offences arising from failure to disclose apply only to a limited number of lawyers in the “regulated sector” who give advice on financial services.

Implementation of the second directive will mean that lawyers conducting any of the activities listed in the directive will fall within its reach.…