Search Results for: International law

BY ALAN OSBORN
1902-1912

British American Tobacco was created on September 29th 1902 as a joint venture between Imperial Tobacco Company of the UK and the American Tobacco Company of the US following a fierce trade war. The parent companies agreed not to trade in each other’s domestic territory and to assign trademarks, export businesses and overseas subsidiaries to the joint venture.…

Keith Nuthall
THE NORWEGIAN government has moved to liberalise its alcohol retail system, following the order from the European Free Trade Area Court that it should scrap its discriminatory beer retail system, where the sale of brands of between 2.5% and 4.75% abv outside the state alcohol monopoly Vinmonopolet is generally limited to domestically-produced lines.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
AN ICELANDIC drinks importer could win compensation from the Iceland government, after the European Free Trade Area Court found that Reykjavik had broken the rules of the European Economic Area, (of which Iceland is a part), by maintaining its alcohol importation monopoly until December 1995.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
REVERSING its earlier position, the European Commission has agreed that the German grid feed-in laws on the promotion of electricity from renewable energy sources and from combined heat and power do not constitute state aid, that Brussels could, in theory, ban.…

BY PHILIP FINE

A CRACKDOWN on healthcare fraud netted the US government more than US$1.3 billion (GBPounds880 million) last year, according to recently released federal statistics. Efforts to better detect and eliminate health care fraud grew over the last five years, due, says Washington, to the establishment of its national Health Care Fraud and Abuse Control Program under the Clinton administration.…

BY JONATHAN THOMSON
FIVE YEARS since it was first proposed, the End-of-Life (ELV) Vehicle Directive has just about made it to the statute books of a handful of EU member states. A directive both controversial and complex, it was maybe surprising, if a little disappointing, that the deadline of April 21, 2002 for transposition went by without a single EU country passing legislation.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A REFORM of European company law legislation has been formally proposed by the European Commission, to ease the filing of company documents and registrations via electronic communications and also in any official EU language.

The aim of the tabled changes to the EU’s First Company Law Directive (68/151/EEC), said a Commission statement, is “to make company information more easily and rapidly available to the public while at the same time simplifying ….disclosure…

Keith Nuthall
THE EUROPEAN Investment Bank has drawn up plans to lend up to Euro 62 million to the City of Leipzig, in Germany, funding preparatory ground-works for an industrial park, which would include a new car manufacturing plant. The factory would be completed by 2004 in the north of the city on old farmland, renamed Industriepark Leipzig Nord.…

BY PHILIP FINE

DESPITE 10.5 million vehicles reaching the end of their useful lives each year in the United States, the country has enacted no federal laws concerning car recycling. There have, however, been new binding rules emerging at state level.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
EVERY minute of every day a million smokers light up a cigarette made by BAT and the company’s goal is that every one of them is perfect. How does BAT manage this, and at the same time meet its production, technical and environmental challenges when operations are on such a colossal scale ?…