Search Results for: European Court of Justice

BY KEITH NUTHALL
EUROPEAN Union ministers have approved in principle reforms to EU regulations on financial conglomerates, which have been designed to avoid an Enron-style scandal in Europe. They include rules insisting on the creation of national regulators whose job is to supervise conglomerates and help improve the flow of information about their accounts.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
The more new buildings that go up, the more demand there is for sand and gravel for use as aggregate. In theory there’s an almost inexhaustible supply of it on the sea-bed. But each ton taken away leaves a hole under the sea that fills with water.…

Keith Nuthall
CUSTOMS teams in the European Union have singled out clothing and textile goods for legal proceedings based on pirated and counterfeit goods seized at the EU’s external borders. They account for almost 50 per cent of cases in 2001, despite involving only five per cent of fake copies of any product intercepted, (five million articles of textiles and clothing were seized last year).…

Keith Nuthall
THE EUROPEAN Commission has proposed formal regulations governing the erection of possible future safeguard restrictions within the European Union against Chinese exports of textile and clothing products. Under the agreement approving China’s accession to the World Trade Organisation, Brussels has the right to impose special temporary safeguard duties until December 2008, where a boom in imports threatens “market disruption.”…

BY SWINEETHA DIAS WICKRAMANAYAKA
RETALIATORY duties hitting shoe and fashion accessory imports from the United States may be postponed or never imposed because of concessions made by the US regarding controversial steel safeguard duties that provoked the European Union into planning reprisals.…

Keith Nuthall
THE EUROPEAN Investment Bank has drawn up plans to lend up to Euro 25 million to a German company Eurostamp Deutschland, to enable it to construct and install a production plant for stamped and assembled auto-body parts. The factory would be sited in one of the poorest areas of Saxony, in eastern Germany, which is labelled as an Objective 1 zone by the European Commission and hence eligible for generous EU development grants; the project would create 90 new jobs until 2005 and 150 until 2007.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE NORTH Sea is Europe’s blackspot for maritime sulphur dioxide emissions from fishing vessels, a report ordered by the European Commission has claimed. Pollution from ships in the southern North Sea east of East Anglia and north of the Straits of Dover is the worst in the continent, at between 0.2 and 0.5 kilotonnes annually per square 50 km, with emissions for the northern North Sea coming in at between 0.1 and 0.2 kilotonnes.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
NEW worries about the health and safety of teleworkers, homeworkers and others on short-term contracts are expressed in two new studies by the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work. It says they not only lack the protection of national occupational health and safety (OSH) regulations but may also suffer from “an increased sense of

job insecurity, often associated with work-related stress and its potential human and economic costs.”…

BY ALAN OSBORN
THE EUROPEAN Commission has significantly watered down its proposed

directive on prospectuses following intense lobbying by the financial services industry, the European Parliament and some Member States including Britain. The main change announced today (Friday) is to exempt small and medium-sized companies from the obligation to publish a draft prospectus if their public offering is Euro 2.5 million (Pounds 1.55 million) or less.…

By ALAN OSBORN
Farmers can’t complain that they lack information about long-term trends in agriculture. The European Commission, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the various United Nations food agencies, specialised agricultural research institutes and of course national governments all seem driven to make regular projections about crops, prices and markets several years into the future.…