Search Results for: European Parliament

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has ordered the British government to reform Gibraltar’s offshore company taxation rules by ensuring its ‘Exempt Company’ regime is phased out by December 2005 at the latest. Its action follows an inquiry, which led to the Commission concluding that the tax system constituted illegal state aid, banned under EU law because it unfairly favours one European company over another.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has announced that imports of two cottonseed oils manufactured from genetically modified cotton grown outside the European Union market are to be sold legally in the EU. They will be labelled as a GM foodstuff.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has moved to shore up the increasingly shaky reputation of its merger control regime, by proposing a comprehensive package of reforms designed to streamline its regulation European competition law, focusing its efforts on real problem cases.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Court of Justice has declared that the European Union Council of Ministers made mistakes when it ratified the global Convention on Nuclear Safety. Legislation adopting the treaty should have declared all the roles of the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) in these areas to an international depository, said the court, which ruled that the Council had wrongfully withheld some information about Euratom’s safety work.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
AGREEMENT in principle has been secured at the European Union (EU) Council of Ministers over a proposed EU Regulation writing into European law the International Maritime Organisation’s (IMO) convention on the control of harmful anti-fouling systems on ships, (AFS Convention).…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
SUCCESSFUL negotiations between the European Commission and the governments of Cambodia and Nepal have led to a deal over the extension of existing textile trade agreements between these Asian kingdoms and the European Union (EU). The Commission has asked European ministers to formally agree that these agreements should be prolonged until December 2004, appending a new list of textile products that can be imported into the EU without any quota limits.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has launched extensive public consultation on whether there is a need for a European Union (EU) system for recovering late payments and uncontested debts in a speedy and easy fashion. Brussels is concerned that some Member States have slow legal procedures for such cases, which pose particular difficulties for companies trying to secure payment from a foreign Member State.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission wants to forge partnerships between the European Union, Africa, 12 eastern European countries, the Caucasus and central Asia, to improve water supply and disposal. Brussels wants resulting action programmes to halve the number of people without safe drinking water and decent sanitation by 2015 and develop integrated water resources management plans by 2005.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
IT’S now official. Following agreement this week by its environment ministers, the European Union (EU) is to set up a market to trade pollution permits for carbon dioxide (CO2), the main so-called greenhouse gas, starting in 2005.

The European Commission is delighted, business is pleased, and while not all environmentalists are overjoyed, the balance of opinion among them is clearly favourable.…

BY DENMARK FINCH AND FRITZ BRETT
INTRO

REDUCING stress amongst employees at work can make a major improvement to the bottom line of companies; indeed, so expensive is the problem, says the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work, it is thought to cost the EU at least Euro 20 billion a year in lost time and health costs and affect more than 40 million of its employees.…