Search Results for: Portugal

ALAN OSBORN
The European Commission is bringing actions in the European Court of Justice against Sweden and Portugal for failure to adopt an EU directive on maritime safety. The legislation, which was approved by the EU council in 1999, provides for the regular safety examination of ships arriving at or leaving EU ports and calls on member states to co-operate fully in investigations of marine accidents and incidents.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
WITH the insurance business being one of the most internationally sensitive of global economic sectors, it came as no surprise that the tragic events of September 11 had a dramatic effect on its fortunes, impacting seriously on the work of its regulators, especially in the European Union.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
FRANCE has been added to a European Commission blacklist of Member States who have concluded so-called ‘Open Skies’ agreements with the United States, which grants relevant national airlines additional landing writes in America. Brussels opposes the deals, because they discriminate against carriers from EU countries which have not made similar agreements and also because they help US airlines compete with those based in Europe: the deals allow planes to fly onto a third country, a mixed blessing for EU carriers flying to the US, given its size.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
LOOKING ahead, the work programme of the European Civil Aviation Conference, (ECAC), for 2001 to 2003, seems to have been prepared with a degree of foresight.

Taking account of its general aim of promoting the safe and orderly development of civil aviation on routes to, from and within Europe, its director generals, (representing its member countries), have agreed a comprehensive set of projects focused on security.…

BY JONATHAN THOMSON
HANDLING the needs and issues surrounding the 550 million passengers and billions of tonnes of cargo moving through the airports and terminals of the 38 European Civil Aviation Conference countries is a task of immense scope.

No wonder then that ECAC’s Working Group on Facilitation, (FAL), is comprised of a multi-disciplined team of delegates and observers from areas including customs, immigration, security, public health, drug control as well as of course, air transport users and civil aviation representatives.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE WORLD Trade Organisation has launched a general round at its summit in Qatar, which will include negotiations on liberalising export and import regimes for so-called industrial goods such as fish.

These talks have a final deadline of 2005 and, said the meeting’s communiqué, will try “to reduce or as appropriate eliminate tariffs, including the reduction or elimination of tariff peaks, high tariffs, and tariff escalation, as well as non-tariff barriers, in particular on products of export interest to developing countries.”…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has cleared the proposed merger between steel producers Usinor S.A. of France, Luxembourg-based Arbed S.A. and Aceralia Corporación Siderúrgica S.A. of Spain, a deal which would create the world’s biggest steel company. To secure regulatory approval, the companies have agreed to sell off steel production and distribution operations in France, Spain, Luxembourg, Belgium, Italy and Portugal.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
HEALTH experts have been discussing a report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, (OECD), which has shown Britain performs poorly against its competitors in western Europe and north America, regarding the number of nurses employed per head of population in the late 1990’s.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
IT was telling that the first step taken by President Bush against Islamic terror groups following the World Trade Centre disaster was to freeze bank accounts. The international community has now responded by agreeing common controls to stop terror groups laundering funds.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL AND ALAN OSBORN
WATER pricing reform is on its way in the European Union. The water framework directive passed last year imposes a commitment on Member States by the year 2010 to ensure that their pricing policies “provide adequate incentives for users to use water resources efficiently.”…