Search Results for: European Union

KEITH NUTHALL
Transport ministers of the 15 EU countries have agreed a regulation

that would require road transport companies to pay the same wages and

benefits to drivers from third countries as they do to EU nationals.

The EU Council said the regulation would put an end to “social

dumping” under which EU road companies have taken on drivers from east

European countries, for instance, at significantly lower wages than those

paid to nationals.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE PERFORMANCE of OLAF, the European Union’s new and supposedly independent anti-fraud office, has been criticised by the European Parliament’s Budgetary Control Committee; it has suggested that it has not worked more effectively than its predecessor UCLAF, the European Commission’s in-house fraud busting unit.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Medicines Evaluation Agency (EMEA) is about to complete a new model computer system that will help it and other medical regulators effectively marshal the mountain of data regarding new pharmaceutical products and keep information up to date.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Parliament has set itself on a collision course with the European Commission, by amending the cosmetics directive to ban the sale within the EU of products tested on animals.

In a vote on plans by the Commission to ban animal testing within the EU, while allowing the sale of imported cosmetics that have been produced with such tests, MEP’s voted for a reinstatement of a ban that was agreed in 1993, but has never been implemented.…

KEITH NUTHALL
THE EXEMPTION from European working time regulations for self-employed drivers, could last a lot longer than the three years that was agreed in the informal deal struck in the EU Council of Ministers last year.

Looking at the detail of the amended directive that has now been accepted formally by the Council, the three-year deadline only gives the European Commission the right to propose an end to the exemption.…

Keith Nuthall
A REPORT on allegations of irregularities and fraud regarding EU subsidies paid for the production of flax in Spain, has been sent to the Spanish authorities by the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF). The report, which is expected to lead to criminal proceedings, has also been sent to Michaele Schreyer, the EU budget commissioner, the European Parliament and to the European Commission’s DG agriculture.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
EUROPEAN utilities will be able to apply for grants from budgets of Euro 1.7 billion, which has been earmarked for energy, transport, sustainable development and global change and of Euro 3.6 billion, for information society research – including telecommunications – if proposals from the European Commission for a new framework research programme, are agreed.…

KEITH NUTHALL
DISCUSSIONS are to be held between the European Commission and ACEA, the European car producers’ association, on striking a voluntary agreement on guidelines for car front designs, that will minimise pedestrian casualties in accidents.

A statement from the Commission, following a meeting with manufacturers, said that there were benefits in a voluntary deal over a regulation, in that “a negotiated agreement can be considerably faster to implement and thus more lives could be saved faster.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
WITH the European farming industry facing more fundamental change than it has in decades, it could be said that funding research into ways of making this transformation less painless has to be a good thing. Whatever the view on this fairly facile assumption, the eyes of the agricultural sector should at least be partly turned on Brussels thus year, where debates for the preparation of a new five-year EU research programme are being staged.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Parliament has resisted siren calls from lobbyists to unstitch the compromise struck last year in the EU Council of Ministers over private copying rights in the proposed digital copyright directive. Although MEP’s voted to strengthen the legal guarantees held by copyright holders by insisting that copies should not be made for even indirect commercial gain, the European Commission has declared that it is satisfied with the changes made in the parliament’s second reading of the directive.…