Search Results for: International business

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 KEITH NUTHALL
LONDON-based CVC Capital Partners and Cinven Group Ltd have been moving ahead with the acquisition of Sweden’s AssiDomän AB’s container board and corrugated business units company, Alpha, following approval of the deal by the European Commission. The buyers are investment companies jointly controlling Kappa Holding BV, which is already involved in the manufacture and sale of paper products.…

KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has proposed he creation of a new Euro 13 million per annum scheme to monitor the health of Europe’s forests. Assuming it is approved by European Union ministers, the programme would initially run from January 2003 until December 2008.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
WE all want to eat safely, which is why governments pass laws to ensure that all food sold measures up to minimum standards of purity and quality. But this can be taken too far. If the safety lines are drawn too tightly or in an arbitrary way, they can be a barrier to imports and thus an impediment to free trade.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
THE AVERAGE consumer that tucks into a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia or Chunky Monkey has no idea that this supposedly quaint, hippy-dippy company that started out of an old garage in the beautiful landscape of America’s Vermont Green Mountains, is really owned by the nemesis of such small companies – a faceless multinational – in this case, Unilever.…

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.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL, ALAN OSBORN, MONICA DOBIE AND PHILIP FINE

IF there is one striking characteristic about Washington’s Bush Administration, it must be its almost unprecedented ability to infuriate the entire world with its unilateralism, especially its self-serving trade policies.

For years, the US government has actually played Mary Poppins on food production subsidies, claiming that its handouts do not encourage farmers to overproduce when prices are low.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Parliament’s industry committee has approved a European Commission proposal that the European Union and Euratom should sign up to the International Joint Convention on the Safety of Spent Fuel Management and the Safety of Radioactive Waste Management.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
AN INTERNATIONAL campaign group Health Care Without Harm (HCWH) has recently published a report claiming that in tests, 52 out of 72 name brand beauty products contained industrial chemicals known as phthalates; HCWH claims these can cause birth defects.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
THE AVERAGE consumer that tucks into a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia or Chunky Monkey has no idea that this supposedly quaint, hippy-dippy company that started out of an old garage in the beautiful landscape of America’s Vermont Green Mountains, is really owned by the nemesis of such small companies – a faceless multinational – in this case, Unilever.…