Search Results for: World Trade Organisation⊂mit=Search

BY KEITH NUTHALL, ALAN OSBORN AND PHILIP FINE

THE EUROPEAN Union, the United States and their various allies seem to be moving towards a deal at the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) negotiations over the creation of a global register for protected geographical indications in the wine and spirit trade.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has set out its stall at the World Trade Organisation’s agricultural liberalisation talks, offering the US and other key trading partners the carrot of a 55 per cent cut in “trade distorting domestic farm support” subsidies, if they reciprocate with similar reductions.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE COUNCIL of the European Economic Area has noted pressure from European Free Trade Area members, (Iceland, Norway and Leichtenstein), that they should be freed from any affects of the European Union’s steel safeguard duty regime, launched as a response to the duties imposed by the Bush administration in the US.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Union’s (EU) anti-fraud unit OLAF has claimed that EU treasuries were cheated of Euro 6 million because of a rules of origin scam involving steel wire, which has now been uncovered.

In its 2001-2002 annual report on the fight against fraud in the EU, OLAF tells of inquiries into information provided by British customs officers about an apparent increase in trade between India and the United Arab Emirates in steel wire.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE GENERAL Assembly of the World Intellectual Property Organisation has streamlined and simplified the international patent application filing system as operated under its Patent Cooperation Treaty. Delegates agreed to integrate two key processes, namely an international search looking for existing patents that might throw doubt on the uniqueness of an invention and an examination of the application itself, checking whether it is novel, involves an inventive step and can be exploited industrially.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
AN ATTEMPT by German garden equipment group Viking-Umwelttechnik to have a symbol composed of two rectangles – one green, one grey – registered as an exclusive European Union (EU) trademark has been lost.

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled that consumers would have difficulty associating the shapes with the company’s products, which include garden choppers and shredders; rotary cultivators; lawn mowers; front mowers; ride-on mowers; lawn aerators; lawn trimmers; hedge clippers; sweeping machines; motor saws; and brush cutters.…

BY MATTHEW BRACE
WHEN IATA’s Director General and CEO, Pierre J Jeanniot, spoke at the opening of his organisation’s 58th AGM and the World Air Transport Summit in Shanghai on June 3, 2002, he lamented the industry’s losses of US$12 billion the previous year.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE WORLD Trade Organisation has inaugurated new training facilities for developing country trade officials, a result of the Doha summit that led to the current so-called development trade round. There, governments agreed that officials from poorer countries needed assistance in grappling with complicated trade law talks, so they could play a full part in negotiations.…

BY RICHARD HURST
MONEY laundering is all about fake respectability, transforming the seedy and ill-gotten into the legitimate and well-earned; so in Africa, where better to launder criminal money than through the continent’s most developed economy, South Africa.

Mike Savage, partner at Ernst & Young South Africa, said that the biggest problem facing African governments wanting to seriously tackle money laundering is to pinpoint the movement of funds that are moved across porous borders in a bid to cover tracks and conceal sources.…

Keith Nuthall
INSURANCE companies must brace themselves for exposure to US$150 billion in liabilities from natural disasters linked to global warming, says a new United Nations report, co-authored by industry heavy hitters, such as Prudential and Swiss Re. ‘Climate Change and the Financial Services Industry’ advises the insurance industry to follow an action plan, to withstand policy payouts for floods, storms, forest-fires and other natural disasters, which it says “appear to be doubling every decade and have reached one trillion US dollars in the past 15 years.”…