Search Results for: European Court of Justice

Many friends ask me why, as a businessman and investor controlling pioneering projects, why I am concerned with politics? I always answer that my experience has taught me that the key to progress lies in politics, and this is especially true in Arab countries, where, frankly, politics is everything. …

After the Second World War, Europe emerged economically and socially drained. The war had destroyed so much housing, industry and infrastructure and killed millions of people. Unsurprisingly, the societies of countries who had fought – or been fought over – and that was most of the continent – were brought their knees by the conflict.…

Hubris comes in many forms, but surely the rushed exit of American forces from Afghanistan to meet an artificial political deadline of the 20^th anniversary of the September 11 attacks in the USA is a breathtaking example.

Rather than strengthening the agents of reform in Afghanistan, upon which the US and its allies have inefficiently spent trillions of dollars, this helter-skelter exit has undermined them, leaving at the mercy of a resurgent Taliban.…

The Covid-19 pandemic, as a global crisis, will have worldwide long and short-term effects, although – of course – some counties have been, and will be, hit much harder than others.

Indeed, some countries, with fragile economies and weaker social systems, have been brought close to collapse by the coronavirus.…

The Covid-19 pandemic has delivered experience about how an external crisis – in this case health – that forces AML officers to work at home, poses challenges in maintaining professional excellence. According to the Bank for International Settlements’ Financial Stability Institute an estimated 300 million office workers worked from home in May 2020, including 90% of banking and insurance workers.…

THE PROSECUTORS unit behind last Thursday’s (September 9) raids on Germany’s finance and justice ministries has underlined how it is prepared to file criminal charges against senior officials in these departments as well as within the country’s FIU.

A statement released by the Staatsanwaltschaft Osnabrück (Osnabrück public prosecutors’ office), which has been ordered to probe the FIU, said its inquiries since 2020 has shown how the unit had repeatedly failed to pass on suspicious transaction on to the police and the judiciary.…

INTRODUCTION

While debates continue over whether Aristotle actually said ‘The whole is greater than the sum of its parts’, the concept that a system can deliver more impact than each element of its technology acting alone is well established in the textile sector.…

The European Union (EU) is currently considering reforming its excise duty rules for tobacco products, with the tobacco industry and commentators seeing the negotiation on the integration of e-cigarettes being one of the hottest topics. Today, e-cigarettes in the EU are treated just like any other product, falling under EU VAT rules, and are not subject to EU-excise laws that apply for conventional tobacco products or spirits for instance.…

WHILE the imposition of age limits on the consumption of tobacco and other nicotine products remains very much a national, and in some cases sub-national jurisdiction decision, there is no doubt that the general trend worldwide is for tighter restrictions on younger consumers, even if they are often tough to enforce.…

INTRODUCTION

Financial crime is a minefield for the international textile and clothing industry. With extended international supply chains extending into jurisdictions where the rule of law and a reliable independent judiciary may have a weak hold, if they exist at all, textile and clothing brands and manufacturers must take care.…