Search Results for: Russia

BY ALAN OSBORN

CUBA has always been crucial in the cigar industry, but with the prospect of political change being almost tangible, the island is now the key focus of this premium tobacco sector. For the first time in many years there’s a sense that events could be moving towards a thaw in the 45-year long freeze in relations between the USA and Cuba and an end to the embargo on sales of Cuban cigars into America.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

A COMPREHENSIVE raft of new legislation designed to force the European Union (EU) into further reducing its greenhouse gas emissions has been tabled by the European Commission. As expected, it has proposed targets that biofuels command 10% of the EU’s liquid fuel consumption by 2020.…

BY MARK ROWE

RUSSIA has engaged in a series of political and economic spats with its former Soviet satellites and the European Union (EU) in the first years of the 21st century. And while stand-offs over Belarus sugar and Moldovan wine might raise eyebrows in the West, disputes over the vast energy resources in Russia and its Central Asian neighbours carry an altogether darker shade, mainly because Russia supplies 25% of the EU’s oil and 25% of its gas.…

BY PAUL COCHRANE, in Tripoli and Beirut

THE OPENING up of Libya’s economy could not have come at a better time for international oil companies, which have been beset in recent years by dwindling easily accessible oil reserves, tighter controls over exploration rights and extraction, and heightened security concerns.…

BY ALAN OSBORN

THE NEXT twelve months – say to Easter 2009 – could prove of fundamental significance for the development of European Union (EU) energy policy on several fronts. In January this year, the European Commission published its long-awaited proposals on renewable energies and CO2 saving, and history may well judge this to be the moment when the EU turned decisively green.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

HEAVIER vehicles such as SUVs and luxury models will be able to breach a proposed European Union (EU) carbon dioxide cap, under formally proposed legislation now tabled by the European Commission. Pressure from German manufacturers forced Brussels into abandoning an absolute cap for all new models of 130 grams of CO2 per kilometre.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

RUSSIA has agreed to lift its import ban on Polish meat exports, which it has maintained for two years because of health concerns. The agreement could unblock attempts to forge a European Union-Russia trade and energy deal.

ENDS…

BY ALAN OSBORN

RUSSIA and eastern European countries will be eager consumers of car rental and company fleet leasing services in the next few years but would-be players in these markets should know that a slew of administrative problems, supply delays and tax complications may await them.…

BY MARK ROWE

RUSSIA’S booming economy means that those old images of grey queues for low-grade fuel to run Moskvich and other Soviet era cars are long gone. Instead, the country’s fuel retail sector has an incentive for dramatically overhauling the present state of affairs, which predominantly involves poorly established, locally run chains and Western chains fighting – sometimes unsuccessfully – for market share.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE EUROPEAN Bank for Reconstruction & Development (EBRD) is planning to lend Russia’s SiseCam group Euro 37.5 million and invest Euro 15 million to help expand its Russian glass beverage container production. The money should help build a new glass bottling plant with an initial annual capacity of 140,000 tonnes, near Krasnodar, southern Russia.…