Search Results for: Poland

BY KEITH NUTHALL
DRIVE into eastern Europe and your chance of being killed in a road accident rise steeply say the latest European Union (EU)-wide comparative accident figures from EU statistical agency Eurostat. The EU’s worst blackspots are Latvia at 752 road accident deaths per million car registrations; Romania 749; Lithuania 571; Slovakia 507 and Poland 476.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
USED clothing handlers in the European Union (EU) will find it difficult to claim their sorting of old clothes for export to another EU country sufficiently changes the nature of these textile products to confer geographical origin. This follows a European Court of Justice (ECJ) case involving a German second-hand clothes handler Euro Tex Textilverwertung.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Union (EU) is catching up with the United States in innovation, a European Commission-financed statistical report has claimed, although the US still has many significant advantages. This year’s European Innovation Scoreboard (2006) concludes: “The innovation gap between the EU [minus new members Bulgaria and Romania] and Japan, and in particular with the US is decreasing.”…

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 KEITH NUTHALL
THE STEEPNESS in the decline of British commercial fishing catches from 1995 until 2005 has been highlighted in a new report from European Union (EU) statistical agency Eurostat. It shows that for the north-east Atlantic, North Sea and the Baltic, total British commercial catches fell from 905,678 tonnes in 1995 to 658,802 in 2005, a fall of 28%.…

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
THE UNITED Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) is pushing signatories to its new Protocol on Water and Health to its Convention on Protection and Use of Transboundary Watercourses and International Lakes to agree detailed targets on improving European water quality.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Court of Justice (ECJ) has told Poland to harmonise its excise duty for used cars imported from other European Union (EU) countries with that paid on cars initially sold in Poland. The court ruled that the fact excise charged on imported used cars rose according to their age up to a maximum of 65% (depending on engine size), discriminated against imported used cars, because excise duty is only charged on cars originally used in Poland when they are new, and at a lower rate.…

BY ALAN OSBORN and MARK ROWE
IN the space of some five years, biofuels have grown from almost total insignificance in the European Union (EU) to becoming the only practical alternative to petrol as a fuel for motor vehicles and much else – albeit still at a very low level.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

RUSSIA is threatening to impose an import ban on all European Union (EU) meat products from January 1. Moscow has written to the European Commission warning of a potential embargo because of the admission that day of Bulgaria and Romania to the EU – Russia claims safety concerns over these country’s meat products, which would henceforth have free circulation in the EU.…