Search Results for: France

BY DAVID HAWORTH, in Brussels
POLITICAL battle lines have been drawn within the European Union’s (EU) executive body over whether minimum excise duties paid on diesel should be imposed on motorists across the 27 nation bloc. The European Commission’s Laszlo Kovacs, who is the Commissioner responsible for tax policy, wants to hike tax levels to Euro 359 per 1,000 litres by 2012 and up to Euros 380 per 1,000 litres by 2014.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
A CENTRAL purpose of the European Union’s (EU) second money laundering directive (sometimes called 2MLD amongst officials) that came into effect in 2003 was to extend to estate agents, along with other similar professions, the anti-money laundering (AML) controls until then had applied only to banks and one or two other financial institutions.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
FURTHER details of an important European Union (EU) fishing access deal with Madagascar lasting until 2012 have been released as the European Commission asks EU ministers to formally approve the agreement. Papers released by Brussels show that as well as 44 freezer tuna seiners, and 44 surface longliners, five French vessels may carry out exploratory line or bottom longline fishing for demersal species over two six-month periods.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
BEEF production in the European Union (EU) is likely to fall in the years to 2013 the European Commission is predicting, because of subsidy cuts under common agricultural policy (CAP) reform and the shrinking size of EU dairy herds.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
EUROPEAN Union (EU) fishermen will be able to harvest 10,000 tonnes of tuna and related species from Mozambique Indian Ocean waters from this year to 2012, under a new agreement negotiated by the European Commission. This new fisheries partnership agreement, replaces an agreement spanning 2004-6, assuming it is rubber stamped by EU ministers.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
FOLLOWING a year or more of advance razzmatazz, the European Union’s multi-pronged energy strategy was unveiled on January 10 and while history may not see it as the “new industrial revolution” that Brussels proclaimed, there’s enough in it to engage the minds of everybody in the energy industry for perhaps years to come.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE BALTIC States are the European Union’s (EU) boom-region for research spending increases, according to the latest R&D figures from EU statistical agency Eurostat, which show Britain’s performance as relatively static. Annual average growth rates in real terms research spending from 2001 to 2005 ranged from +18% in Latvia, +17% in Estonia, and +11% in Lithuania, (+15% in Cyprus).…

BY ALAN OSBORN
AN odd fact about Serbia today is that hardly anybody in the country seems curious about the way its official government financial figures don’t remotely add up. The authors of a US-sponsored report for the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) published last October – ‘Money Laundering and Predicate Crime in Serbia 2000-2005’ – acknowledge the conventional shortages of staff and computers but say they “hit on a more fundamental void: lack of curiosity.”…

BY MARK ROWE
CLIMATE change, the general scientific consensus now holds, is taking place, and will continue to do so even were we to stop our fossil fuel emissions overnight. And while there may be jests to the effect that hotter summers would be good news for drinks manufacturers, the reality is that the drinks sector faces as many challenges as any other industry, both in terms of ingredient and energy supplies, production adjustments and related commercial issues.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
IT’S had a somewhat laborious beginning but at long last it seems that the West African regional body for fighting money laundering – formally known as the Groupe Inter-gouvernemental d’Action contre le Blanchiment en Afrique (GIABA) – is ready to begin operations in earnest.…