Search Results for: European Parliament

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Union’s (EU) anti-fraud unit OLAF has claimed cigarette smugglers have developed sophisticated tactics to evade growing law enforcement cooperation between the EU and non-EU countries. OLAF’s latest annual report said: “Because of the sizeable profits….it is no hardship to fraudsters to move containers of cigarettes through several countries, and unload and reload the cigarettes several times.”…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
IT maybe the size of Surrey, but pollution knows no boundaries and the European Commission is concerned about excessive nitrate usage in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. Much of the tiny nation’s river system flows into the Moselle, which is its south-eastern border and it flows into the Rhine and hence to the North Sea.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission is consulting the EU fishing industry over a list of exported American marine products that could be saddled with protective duties of up to 100 per cent. The plan follows a World Trade Organisation ruling allowing Brussels to retaliate against the US’s use of foreign trade corporations to give its exporters illegal tax breaks.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
EUROPEAN Union fisheries Commissioner Franz Fischler is fighting opposition within Portugal to his proposals to introduce multi-annual catch quotas. In a speech, he said: “If bacalhau is to remain on Portuguese menus we have to protect cod stocks from collapse now.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
THE EUROPEAN Commission has taken the first step towards legal action against Spain and Italy over legislation in those countries to control the voting rights of investments by foreign state companies in the energy sector. Brussels says the laws “may unduly restrict free movement of capital as enshrined in European Union (EU) treaty rules.”…

BY ALAN OSBORN
GERMANY is being threatened with legal action by the European Commission over the award of sewage water treatment and gas and electricity supply contracts by the city of Jever, Friesland, north Germany. Brussels says that the contracts were agreed without open tendering procedures legally required to ensure competition in public procurement.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Investment Bank is lending Euro 100 million to the Electricity Authority of Cyprus to help it improve its electricity transmission and distribution networks. The loan will help finance 19 transmission schemes and a larger number of distribution schemes throughout the Greek part of the island.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
ADDITIONAL European Union (EU) funding towards the decommissioning of Lithuania’s Ignalina nuclear power plant and Slovakia’s Bohunice plant has been pledged by an EU heads of government meeting in Brussels. This European Council promised that between 2004 and 2006, the EU would give the Lithuanian government Euro 70 million annually for the job.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission is threatening Sweden with legal action at the European Court of Justice over its failure to pass national rules insisting upon environmental impact assessments (EIA) for the decommissioning of nuclear power stations. Brussels claims that the EU’s EIA directive requires that the dismantling of plants and reactors should be subject to planning consent, following an environmental impact assessment.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
PERUVIAN fishermen will almost certainly now be allowed to market their sardine catches in the European Union as sardines, after the appellate body of the World Trade Organisation rejected an EU appeal against an earlier WTO ruling backing Peru’s case.…