Search Results for: Greek

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission is taking Greece to the European Court of Justice asking judges to order a separation of the Greek Public Power Corporation’s accounts for its lignite mining and its electricity generation. Brussels says Greece is breaking the European Union electricity directive, which outlaws common accounts possibly masking illegal cross-subsidies between two separate business activities.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
WANT to sell cigarettes? Go east, young man. That might be the advice that tobacco companies could glean from the latest set of World Health Organisation (WHO) smoking figures. Using 2003 or latest available data, the WHO has collated percentage rate proportions of smoking adults (18 and over), compared with total populations of all but 56 countries: the overwhelming majority of nations.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Union’s (EU) pesticide residue laws are designed to prevent food consumers poisoning themselves with insect killer, but that important fact has not stopped European law being as much of an ass as its British cousin. For the European Court of Justice (ECJ) is expected to rule that vine leaves are not covered by European Union (EU) pesticide residue legislation.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE GREEK government’s alleged failure to implement European Union (EU) rules on solvency margins for life assurance and non-life insurance businesses has landed it in the European Court of Justice (ECJ). The European Commission has launched a case after being dissatisfied with Athens’ response to its final warning letters.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has formally threatened Greece with a European Court of Justice (ECJ) case over its requirement that companies providing local third-party motor insurance must belonging to the Greek national association of insurance companies. Brussels said this could “risk preventing or discouraging insurance companies from other (EU) member states from entering the Greek market, and thus a risk of restricting competition on prices and on the access of policyholders to a wider selection of companies”.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE INCOMING European Commissioner for health and consumer affairs has committed himself to comprehensively overhauling the European Union’s (EU) consumer protection legislation, to kick start Europe’s sluggish cross-border shopping market. Answering a European Parliament questionnaire ahead of assuming office in November, Cyprus’ Markos Kyprianou said the current laws were a “patchwork”, creating a minimalist safety net of common European rights that failed to inspire confidence.…

BY MARK ROWE
AT first sight they would appear to be uneasy bedfellows. On the one hand, English Heritage, the British government’s advisory body with responsibility for the care and maintenance of the country’s historic environment; on the other, the Marxist-led government of the Indian state of West Bengal.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled that European Union (EU) insurance laws allow owed salaries to be paid ahead of outstanding policy claims, when an insurance company goes out of business. Its ruling has come in a Greek case brought by a public road-accident liability fund – Epikouriko Kefalaio – against its government for ordering Intercontinental AE, also of Greece, to release part of its frozen assets to pay salary claims.…

BY DAVID HAWORTH
STAVROS Dimas, the next EU Commissioner for Environmental Affairs, was criticised as one of the weaker cards in the Barroso Commission pack when he appeared before a European Parliament hearing last week.

There was cross-party sentiment that the former Greek Industry Minister did not have sufficient experience of environmental matters.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE INCOMING European Commissioner for health and consumer affairs has shown signs in a European Parliament questionnaire that he could be as feisty as his predecessor, Ireland’s David Byrne, calling for an EU-wide ban on smoking in public.…