The European Commission announced Tuesday that it has approved a merger and a joint venture — one in the ethanol industry and a second in pork production.
12/21/2010
— Filed under: Business
Tags: EU, joint venture, Shell
Northern Ireland is still much safer than England and Wales, a crime survey revealed today.
12/20/2010
— Filed under: Crime
Tags: level, Northern Ireland, nuclear power station, police
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European economic policies will come under more scrutiny from this month when the European Central Bank takes the lead in a new financial police authority with whistle-blowing powers to prevent future crises.
The European systemic risk board (ESRB), chaired by Jean-Claude Trichet, ECB president, will have powers to issue warnings and recommendations when it sees threats to economies or financial systems. But it could have a tough time proving that such limited powers, wielded by European officials, can prevent financial market turmoil on the scale seen in the past three years.
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Although operating at arm’s length from the ECB — and covering the European Union, not just the 17 eurozone countries — the board’s establishment goes some way towards fulfilling the central bank’s ambition for better surveillance to avert economic traumas similar to those that have hit the continent’s 12-year-old monetary union.
The ECB has been disappointed at politicians’ progress in beefing up eurozone governance and wants greater economic surveillance of eurozone members. Vítor Constâncio, ECB vice-president who will sit on the board, told the Financial Times: «If there were serious economic imbalances in a member country we [the board] could say that something should be done about it.»
Mr Constâncio said the systemic risk board could have sounded warnings at an early stage about the problems in Greece — where loss of competitiveness led to a surging current account deficit.
«We could also have warned about housing market bubbles in Spain and Ireland — and about lending in foreign currencies in eastern Europe,» he said. «These are examples of things that the ESRB would have done to prevent crises. If a body such as the systemic risk board, with so many members, issues concrete recommendations of that sort, then something would have to happen.»
Set up as part of a European regulatory overhaul, the board will have 37 voting members, including central bank governors from the 27 EU countries, as well as Mr Trichet and Mr Constâncio and the chairmen of three new pan-European supervisory authorities covering banking, insurance and securities markets.
Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, will be vice-chairman.
His appointment could help avert fears in the UK that EU supervisory arrangements will hurt the City of London. Other members will be senior European experts. The 22-strong secretariat and much of the analytical research will be provided by the ECB in Frankfurt.
Just how effective the new board will be remains unclear. «They could end up warning against everything — or they could be entirely wrong sometimes,» said Karel Lanoo, chief executive of the Brussels-based Centre for European Policy Studies. Mr Lanoo expected the board to build up its role gradually. There were few precedents for creating such institutions, although US regulators are also putting more emphasis on «macroprudential» supervision — looking at dangers that affect the entire economic system, not just individual banks.
A risk for the ECB is that its close association with the new board could undermine its credibility as an institution if it cries wolf too often — or, alternatively, misses the next crisis. «They will be extremely measured in what they say because it could damage the reputation of the ECB and the euro,» said Mr Lanoo.
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12/19/2010
— Filed under: Finance,Politics
Tags: economic crises, EU
Tensions are mounting as Hungary begins its first term in the rotating European Union Presidency, after the European Commission said it was investigating whether a new «crisis tax» imposed on banks in the country is within EU law.
12/18/2010
— Filed under: Finance
Tags: bank tax, EU, Hungary
Switzerland has always been a key destination for Italy’s mafia bosses to launder their assets or hide their cash, but recent probes show that Italian organised crime is broadening its activities there.
12/17/2010
— Filed under: Crime
Tags: Italy, Mafia, Switzerland
Italy’s Senate on Thursday gave parliament’s final approval to a university system reform, including funding cuts of at least 300 million euros (255 million pounds) in 2011, that has drawn large-scale, sometimes violent student protests.
12/16/2010
— Filed under: Politics
Tags: Italy, reform, university
Of what has been called the worst health scandal in the history of France, both the left and the right leaders are facing the heat, equally. The issue comes out just before the publication of an official report on the scandal which if true is going to force both the sides into legal recriminations.
12/15/2010
— Filed under: Politics
Tags: France, health scandal
The UK jobs market will be «under real pressure» in 2011 with public spending cuts leading to thousands of redundancies, a recruitment body has warned.
The wider adoption of cloud computing technology could add an estimated €30 billion (£25,2 billion) to the UK economy in the next five years, according to a report by the Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr).
12/13/2010
— Filed under: Business
Tags: cloud computing technology, UK
Millions of internet users across the EU could be encouraged to join the fight against cyber crime if a ground breaking experiment in «crowd sourcing» goes ahead.
The director of Europol told peers he wants to get net users directly involved in catching cyber crime gangs.
Rob Wainwright briefed a Lords EU sub-committee on plans for a European cyber crime centre.
He said the extent of the problem was often underestimated in the EU.
And criminal gangs were becoming more sophisticated in their use of technology, which was spreading into the world of «offline» crime such as drug and people trafficking and VAT fraud, which netted criminals in the EU 100bn euros (£85bn) last year alone.
Scams
Europol officials say criminals are increasingly communicating with each other through online phone services in the mistaken belief that they are untraceable.
They are also carrying out more «traditional» cyber crimes such as botnets, malicious software that can secretly steal credit card details, and phishing scams, in which people are tricked into handing over confidential details.
Mr Wainwright, a former senior official with the UK’s Serious and Organised Crime Agency, said Europol was stepping up its fight against internet-based crime ahead of the opening of a planned cyber crime centre, funded by the European Commission.
Europol, an EU-wide police intelligence agency based in The Hague, already had a «dedicated intelligence project designed to identify the most significant cyber criminals operating in Europe», Mr Wainwright told the committee.
He said the next stage was to launch an «internet crime reporting online system».
This initiative, originally conceived by the French Presidency of the EU in 2008, would, for the first time, «collect all internet crime reported online at a national level, in a harmonised way across the EU,» he told the committee.
‘Empower citizens’
It would have the ability to alert police in the 27 member states to «connections between different investigations».
«For the first time the EU will have a comprehensive overview of reported cyber crime from within its own borders and this could even include, in the future, a component of direct engagement with the public,» said the Europol chief.
Europol strategic analyst Victoria Baines later explained to BBC News that the organisation was interested in eventually using a form of «crowd sourcing» to gather examples of suspected cyber crime so it could build up a fuller picture of illegal activity.
This would involve concerned net users scouring the net for possible examples of crime and reporting it, possibly through a dedicated website.
It could operate along similar lines to America’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), a joint venture between the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Centre, which for the past 10 years has allowed victims of cyber crime to make a complaint online.
But the Europol system could potentially go further because it would not be restricted to people who had themselves been the victim of cyber crime or who wanted to make a formal complaint to a law enforcement agency.
‘Empower citizens’
Ms Baines said the idea was to raise awareness of crimes such as the «online solicitation of children», payment card transaction fraud or «social engineering», in which people are tricked into giving their passwords or other personal details.
And then «to empower citizens not only to look out for themselves but to report criminal activity».
But Mr Wainwright stressed in his evidence that Europol’s first priority was to involve private industry and academia in the fight against cyber crime.
The crowd sourcing plan is in its embryonic stages, and will depend on the setting up of the European cyber crime centre, which is planned by 2014, if funding can be secured.
But Mr Wainwright told BBC News he was keen to «scope out» crowd sourcing and saw it as a potentially vital part of the the war on cyber crime.
The Lords EU Home Affairs sub-committee is investigating the EU’s internal security strategy.
