Search Results for: Russian

BY ALAN OSBORN
THE EUROPEAN Bank for Reconstruction and Development is to lend Viking River Cruises US$15 million to acquire three cruise ships to ply the Danube and Volga rivers. The Scandinavian/Dutch owned company is the world’s largest river cruise line with a fleet of 30 ships operating in European and Russian waterways.…

Keith Nuthall
A REARGUARD action is being fought by the European Commission to save its ambitious proposals to impose a deadline of 2005 on the complete liberalisation of the EU electricity market. Following pressure from the French government, EU governments have agreed to rule the idea out, preferring a looser deadline, although this has yet to be formally agreed at the Council of Ministers.…

KEITH NUTHALL
MEMBER States of the European Union have been placed under increasing political and legal pressure from both the European Commission and the European Court of Justice to improve the environmental quality of their water supplies.

France, for instance, has lost a long-running case at the ECJ, over its failure to ensure the availability of sufficiently clean drinking water in Brittany.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has warned Norwegian gas producers that the joint sale of Norwegian gas carried out through the national Gas Negotiation Committee is in breach of the European Union competition rules, because it fixes, among other things, the price and the quantities sold.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE UN Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention (ODCCP) has called for a balance to be struck worldwide between privacy rights and banking secrecy, to slow global criminal cash flows. Its appeal came in a statement released for a conference on “Illegal Economy and Money Laundering,” in St.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
CRIMINALS are still fleecing the European Union’s budget of hundreds-of-millions of Euro, according to the latest European Commission fraud report. But Brussels is refusing to throw in the towel, unveiling more anti-fraud proposals, Keith Nuthall reports.

THE ANNUAL report on the Protection of the Communities’ (EU’s) Financial Interests and the Fight Against Fraud always seems to have been misnamed, in that it usually focuses on how much money the European Union has been losing to fraudsters, rather than saving.…

KEITH NUTHALL
WATER has no great value in itself. It is it what it helps create that counts. And for every improvement in efficiency in water use, communities and companies get richer and consume less water when doing so. It is what economists call a virtuous circle.…