Search Results for: German

BY MONICA DOBIE and KEITH NUTHALL
A GROUND-breaking environmental initiative is being developed in Greece involving a desalination plant being powered wholly by the heat of the earth’s upper crust.

The plant’s electricity turbines will be driven by geothermal fluids pumped from deep underground fissures under the island, whose temperatures can reach 100°C.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
THE EUROPEAN Commission has proposed a new directive to cover takeover bids in the EU that will allow, among other things, a majority shareholder to require minority holders to sell him their securities while empowering minority shareholders to require the majority holder to buy them out.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A COORDINATING centre for European digital publishers of academic texts has been launched with a public blitz on the traditional publishing sector, accusing it of being lethargic and vulnerable to unscrupulous reviewer academics who may exploit their contents prior to publication.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
WE know that irresponsible sea-sand dredging can led to coastal erosion, threatening beaches and ecological balance and even the livelihoods of whole sea-side or fishing communities. Yet there is today an unprecedented demand for sand as a building material.…

From Alan Osborn
The German travel company TUI AG (formerly Preussag) has

acquired sole control of Nouvelles Frontières, a French company also

active in the holiday sector, under a deal approved today (Tuesday 27th)

by the European Commission.TUI currently holds around 30% of NF’s capital

and is now is exercising an exclusive option to buy shares from the NF

founder Jacques Maillot (who has 41.92 per cent) and a number of minority

shareholders.…

Keith Nuthall
THE EUROPEAN Investment Bank has drawn up plans to lend up to Euro 25 million to a German company Eurostamp Deutschland, to enable it to construct and install a production plant for stamped and assembled auto-body parts. The factory would be sited in one of the poorest areas of Saxony, in eastern Germany, which is labelled as an Objective 1 zone by the European Commission and hence eligible for generous EU development grants; the project would create 90 new jobs until 2005 and 150 until 2007.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
AN ITALIAN leather manufacturer appears to have lost an international legal struggle to prevent a former German company from using a trade name similar to its own to market furniture upholstered with leather bought from alternative suppliers. In a test case at the European Court of Justice, Italian Leather, of Bironto, Italy, has failed to establish that a ruling that it secured at Bari District Court should overrule a decision made earlier at the Regional Court, Koblenz, Germany.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
NOT many items of legislation from Brussels have provoked quite such anger among farmers over the years as the nitrates directive, which seeks to protect water from nitrate pollution caused by the application of organic and inorganic fertilisers to agricultural land.…

Keith Nuthall
THE EUROPEAN Commission has ordered the Dutch government recover maritime transport aid it has paid out since 1996 to port and inland waterway towage operations, ruling that these payments broke EU state aid rules. Brussels approved subsidies from the Netherlands to towage operators, but had assumed that this money was for limited to ships working on the open seas.…

BY DEIRDRE MASON
EASTERN European countries that built nuclear power plants while under the communist system never thought they would face deadlines for closing them down as a prerequisite for joining the European Union. Neither had they built in the next stage – decommissioning – into the prices charged for electricity in the way that the western European nuclear plant operators had done from the start.…