Search Results for: Romanian

BY MARK ROWE AND CARMEN PAUN

AMIDST the fanfare that greeted Romania and Bulgaria’s accession to the European Union, there was little expectation that membership would eradicate corruption overnight. There were, though, reasonable grounds for anticipating tangible progress. Five years on, major corruption scrutiny bodies appear to have come to just such a conclusion: that Bulgaria at least has made substantial efforts to clean out some of the worst elements of corruption, but has plenty left to do.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

PRESSURE is growing on European Union (EU) ministers to give the EU’s sugar production quota system a stay of execution. MEPs on the European Parliament’s agriculture committee have called for the retention of EU sugar quotas for beet farmers until 2020, rather than follow existing plans to phase them out in 2015.…

BY CARMEN PAUN

Senior Romanian professors have dismissed attacks on their integrity made after they were involved in analysing the accusation of academic plagiarism against the country’s Prime Minister Victor Ponta. The University of Bucharest’s Mircea Dumitru and Professor Marius Andruh have both come under fire from supporters of the prime minister, but have vigorously rejected the criticism levelled against them.…

BY CARMEN PAUN AND KEITH NUTHALL

ROMANIA’S Prime Minister Victor Ponta has been accused of plagiarising his PhD (ironically on the International Criminal Court) by two senior academic bodies. First, the Romanian National Council for Attesting Titles, Diplomas and University Certificates (CNATDCU) ruled on June 29 that the PM copied part of his 2003 thesis – and it was dismantled by the ministry of education that same day.…

BY CARMEN PAUN, IN BRUSSELS

THE FINAL battle over the proposed European Union (EU) energy efficiency directive will be fought article by article over the next weeks in Brussels, Martin Lidegaard, Denmark’s climate and energy minister said on Thursday. "There’s still a lot of work to be done, a lot of compromises that should be achieved and it will need flexibility from our side, but also from the [European] Parliament and the Commission’s side if we shall succeed in ending [the negotiations for] this directive," Lidegaard told a press conference.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

ROMANIAN pigmeat exporters have been told they can at last allow its pigmeat exporters to sell into the rest of the European Union (EU), lifting a ban existing since Romania joined the EU in January 2007 over swine flu control concerns.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE EUROPEAN Commission has confirmed it is scrapping sugar production quotas across the European Union (EU) in 2015 when proposing a comprehensive reform of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). There have been calls from some member states and MEPs for the quota regime to be renewed, but the Commission has stuck to its guns and will continue with abolition.…

BY ZLATKO CONKAS, BLAKE BERRY, MONIKA HANLEY, MARK ROWE and KEITH NUTHALL

EASTERN Europe is often regarded as developing in the slipstream of richer western Europe – and so far the model seems to be fitting with biofuels. That said, significant biodiesel manufacturing capacity is in place in the region, according to the European Biodiesel Board.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE EUROPEAN Commission has taken another step towards focusing the European Union’s (EU) support for biofuel production on those fuels that create at least 35% less carbon emissions than fossil fuels. A key part of this process is using certification schemes to ensure that biofuels are green, taking account of the environmental impact of their production as well as use, and the Commission has now recognised seven of these systems.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE EUROPEAN Parliament has called for improvements to be made to three eastern Europe decommissioning programmes if generous European Union (EU) funding is to be renewed.

The EU is now starting to consider its next medium-term financing programme from 2014 to 2020, which means authorisation for many spending projects will lapse in 2013.…