Search Results for: Russia

BY MARK ROWE and KEITH NUTHALL

RUSSIA’S belligerent approach to its neighbours in recent years has ranged from military conflict with Georgia to energy disputes with Ukraine and a string of commodity-based stand-offs, such as rows with Norway over fish products, Poland over meat supplies and Belarus over sugar.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE UKRAINE government has secured a major loan package designed to secure its reliability as a winter suppler of gas to Europe through improving its gas storage and distribution. The European Commission welcomed the deal, which it helped broker.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THERE is a sense, in the rivers of documents pouring from international talks to replace the Kyoto Protocol with a new global warming treaty in Copenhagen this December that the chickens are really coming home to roost.

For the first time – at July’s G8 summit in Italy – there was a common near-universal declaration that humankind has been messing up the climate and has to stop filling the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.…

BY PHILIPPA JONES, in Paris; LEE ADENDORFF, in Lucca, Italy; KARRYN MILLER, in Tokyo; and LUCY JONES, in Dallas

IT almost seems commonsense to say that an industry providing such a human product as clothing has to take account of cultural sensibilities in target markets.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

EUROPEAN Union (EU) drinks exports to the USA are under pressure according to economic analysis from the European Commission – maybe a medium-term problem. Its latest MAP (Monitoring Agri-trade Policy) report warns "for the past two years the US appears to be a declining market for the EU" for drink and food, with alcoholic beverages accounting for seven of the top 10 products, (wine the biggest export, valued at Euro 1.7 billion in 2006-08).…

BY ANDREW CAVE

Food commodity prices are seldom out of the news nowadays, due to a mushrooming global population, the food-for-fuel controversy, an increasing focus on sustainability and the continued growth of the organic sector. However, beyond the generality of crop prices spiralling to new highs in 2007 and 2008 and then plummeting – in some cases – back to where they were before the boom, the picture is far from uniform.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

RUSSIA’S leading cosmetics company Kalina has been offered a US$40 million loan by the European Bank for Reconstruction & Development (EBRD) to help it refinance short term debts during the recession. The loan will also provide it with long-term working capital, helping it sustain market share and attack new market segments.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

INTERNATIONAL talks are underway to secure Ukraine funding to pay Russia for natural gas to ensure deliveries to Europe can be guaranteed this winter.

The European Commission, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the European Investment Bank (EIB) and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) have been meeting with Russian and Ukraine officials to head off a repeat of last winter’s supply crisis.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE ORGANISATION for Economic Cooperation & Development (OECD) has called in a major economic report on Russia for it to scrap oil export taxes. Branding them "both the largest burden on oil companies in Russia and the least efficient fiscal instrument", the OECD said their application "distorts the price of domestic oil, which is depressed by the tax".…

BY ALAN OSBORN

THESE are uncertain times for international aviation deals generally thanks to the global recession, but nowhere is the situation more fraught than in Washington where negotiations for the second stage of the 2007 ‘open skies’ agreement between the European Union (EU) and the USA appear to have run into the buffers.…