Search Results for: Belgium

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Union’s anti-fraud office OLAF has been called in to investigate financial corruption at the EU’s Committee of the Regions, the Brussels body representing local governments across Europe.

Its investigators are checking allegations made by Dutch socialist MEP Michiel van Hulten to the European Parliament that the record of financial probity at the CoR “can only be described as alarming.”…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Union (EU) Council of Ministers has approved in principle tightening the EU packaging and packaging waste directive so that by 2008, Member States should recycle at least 50 per cent of metals found in packaging waste.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
IF accountants want to give really useful advice to their clients that applies almost anywhere in the developed world, they should tell them to get married and have kids.

That would be the most logical conclusion that could be drawn from the latest Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) publication on tax, “Taxing Wages.”…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Union (EU) is moving towards a deal with Switzerland over the payment of a withholding tax to avoid releasing information about EU citizens owning Swiss bank savings accounts. It wants to protect these clients from tax demands from their home countries.…

BY MATTHEW BRACE
WITH Australia sharing the front-line in President Bush’s war against terrorism with Britain and the USA, and also having witnessed its citizens dying in last year’s Bali nightclub terror attack, it is maybe not surprising that it has been tightening its money laundering legislation, especially as regards terrorists.…

KEITH NUTHALL
THE MOST important driver of reform in the institutions of the European Union today is the impending enlargement of the EU eastwards, to take in (Greek) Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
IF there was ever a good example to show how the economic interests of humankind generally trump those of the environment, look no further than the Aral Sea, or rather, seas, as it is today. Once a beautiful 66,900 square km inland great lake, it has since the 1960’s shrunk to less than half this size and split in two.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
EUROPEAN Union (EU) Competition Commissioner Mario Monti is to ask his colleagues on the European Commission to ban two special tax regimes – in Netherlands and Belgium – while allowing a threatened taxation system in Ireland to continue.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has referred to the Belgian competition authorities six merger cases involving the sale by Flanders local authorities of gas and electricity supply services to the country’s energy giant Electrabel. The councils have been forced to offload the services to comply with Belgium’s electricity and gas liberalisation legislation.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
IN LEGAL terms, it is a Herculean task: streamlining and reducing the thousands of pages of the European Union’s (EU) body of law, the acquis communautaire. However, the European Commission does not seem to be intimidated, after all, it proposed most of this legislation in the first place.…