Search Results for: Serbia

BY KEITH NUTHALL
WITH the key May 18 European Union (EU)-Russia summit in Samara, Russia, looming, the European Commission is continuing efforts to find suitable alternative energy partners to Moscow. Russia and the EU want to start tough negotiations on forging a new energy agreement, with both sides firming up their positions.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
SPAIN’S wine-making province La Rioja is heading a Spanish team tasked with helping the Serbia agriculture ministry resurrect a once thriving local wine industry. The European Agency for Reconstruction-managed Euro 1.4 million project will improve quality assurance and vineyard registration and classification.…

BY MARK ROWE
MEMBERSHIP of the European Union (EU) appears to represent something o a ‘promised land’ for the nations of the Balkans. A major sticking point for countries pushing for membership, though, is corruption, and in particular efforts to push through practical and applicable anti-fraud legislation.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
NATURAL gas-rich Kazakhstan’s increasing thirst for beer has helped prompt European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) plans to lend around US$40 million in local currency (Kazakh Tenge 5.2 billion) to a leading local beer producer. The money would assist Efes Karaganda Brewery JSC in boosting brewing capacity, infrastructure facilities and marketing departments at existing plants in Almaty and Karaganda.…

BY DEIRDRE MASON
WITH every new piece of European Union (EU)-inspired road and vehicle-safety legislation brings a new opportunity to make and sell the kit to local authorities so that they can comply. Speed limiters may not be the newest story in safety equipment, but the requirements to fit them had a further boost on January 1 this year.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
AN odd fact about Serbia today is that hardly anybody in the country seems curious about the way its official government financial figures don’t remotely add up. The authors of a US-sponsored report for the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) published last October – ‘Money Laundering and Predicate Crime in Serbia 2000-2005’ – acknowledge the conventional shortages of staff and computers but say they “hit on a more fundamental void: lack of curiosity.”…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

EUROPEAN Union (EU) anti-fraud unit OLAF is investigating China garlic smuggling, with low production costs and high EU duties generating high illegal profits. OLAF claims Euro 60 million in duties are being lost, with only meat (of all kinds) and sugar subject to more food-fraud inquiries – 17 are ongoing into garlic.…

BY ALAN OSBORN

THE LATEST report on the fight against money laundering in Bosnia & Herzegovina (BiH) is a working document issued in November this year from the staff of the European Commission and it makes depressing reading. Reviewing the past year the report finds that "limited progress" has been made in this sector, at least partly because of a lack of qualified staff and because existing legislation is "inadequate".…

BY ALAN OSBORN

KOSOVO differs from all other countries that the Money Laundering Bulletin has surveyed so far in the context of money laundering in that it has no defined and internationally recognised final shape – neither in respect of its borders nor in the composition of its government.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

EXPORTERS of meat and bone meal waste shipping cargoes from the European Union (EU) to non-EU power incinerators do not have to make special declarations to environmental authorities, a European Court of Justice advocate general has recommended.

Juliane Kokott has said this is the case even if the animal waste was contaminated by BSE: "…contamination by risk material, if… incinerated, does not lead to any apparent increased risk to the environment."…