By George Parker in Brussels
Published: June 3 2007 22:01 Last updated: June 3 2007 22:01 (www.ft.com)
European companies are being exposed to cut-price dumping by foreign rivals because of a secret change in trade policy in Brussels, 10 big industries have claimed.
Peter Mandelson, European Union trade commissioner, has denied claims that Brussels covertly lowered Europe’s defences against unfair subsidies by other countries and has shown “unequivocal political bias” against anti-dumping measures.
The allegations are made in a letter from industry bodies representing 10 of the European industries most exposed to global competition, including textiles, chemicals, metals, mining and fertilisers.
Writing to José Manuel Barroso – European Commission president and Mr Mandelson’s boss – they claim that the trade chief has changed his handling of anti-dumping cases behind the backs of member states.
Brussels instigated 36 anti-dumping measures last year – including controversial cases involving Chinese shoes, plastic bags and bicycle parts – but there has been none this year.
“The Commission’s changed practice is more and more widely perceived as an anti-industry policy bias,” the industries claim.
Mr Mandelson launched a consultation in December on reforming Europe’s anti-dumping rules following clashes between countries such as Britain and Sweden – dominated by big retailers who want low-cost goods for consumers – and manufacturing countries such as Italy, Spain and Portugal.
The commissioner says that, unless a balance can be found between the two sides and unity is restored, Europe’s trade defence mechanism “risks becoming inoperable”.
Mr Mandelson has also pointed out that European manufacturers that outsource production to Asia are among those hit by anti-dumping measures as well as consumers.
The 10 industry bodies suspect Mr Mandelson has already made up his mind and has tilted implementation of anti-dumping rules away from European manufacturers even before the trade defence consultation is complete.
“Facts demonstrate that the Commission is already implementing a policy line which not only disregards the outcome of the public consultation but also compromises the existing rule of law and flouts the right of defence,” their letter says.
Mr Mandelson’s team flatly denies any change of policy, arguing that the absence of any new anti-dumping measures in 2007 was simply “the calm after the storm” of controversial cases last year.
Mr Mandelson’s officials also point out that their assessment of anti-dumping claims are closely governed by European law. They also say that Europe’s improved economic outlook means EU companies are less likely to suffer harm from low-cost imports.
A spokesman for Mr Barroso insisted the Commission was sticking strictly to the law. “We welcome any contributions to the consultation,” he said.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Sunday, June 3, 2007
A Legal Debate in Guantánamo on Boy Fighters
The facts of Omar Ahmed Khadr’s case are grim. The shrapnel from the grenade he is accused of throwing ripped through the skull of Sgt. First Class Christopher J. Speer, who was 28 when he died.
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Omar Ahmed Khadr
To American military prosecutors, Mr. Khadr is a committed Al Qaeda operative, spy and killer who must be held accountable for killing Sergeant Speer in 2002 and for other bloody acts he committed in Afghanistan.
But there is one fact that may not fit easily into the government’s portrait of Mr. Khadr: He was 15 at the time.
His age is at the center of a legal battle that is to begin tomorrow with an arraignment by a military judge at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, of Mr. Khadr, whom a range of legal experts describe as the first child fighter in decades to face war-crimes charges. It is a battle with implications as large as the growing ranks of child fighters around the world.
Defense lawyers argue that military prosecutors are violating international law by filing charges that date from events that occurred when Mr. Khadr was 15 or younger. Legal concepts that are still evolving, the lawyers say, require that countries treat child fighters as victims of warfare, rather than war criminals.
The military prosecutors say such notions may be “well-meaning and worthy,” but are irrelevant to the American military commissions at Guantánamo. Mr. Khadr is one of only three Guantánamo detainees to face charges under the law establishing the commissions, passed by Congress last year.
“International law,” the Justice Department asserted in a court filing in the case last week, “does not prohibit an individual under 18 from being prosecuted for war crimes.” Even so, prosecutors said that if they won a conviction, they would seek something less than a life term, given Mr. Khadr’s age. He is 20 now.
Whatever the outcome, his case seems destined to become a landmark, though some scholars say not enough attention has been given to its importance. “What is the precedent that we are setting with this unique step?” asked Peter W. Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has written about child fighters.
Mr. Khadr’s case offers a snapshot of relatively new questions surrounding the legal treatment of child fighters globally, though advocates for children have tended to focus less on young terrorists and more on children who fight in civil wars, like Ishmael Beah, whose best-selling memoir, “A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier,” recounts his bloody days as a child soldier in Sierra Leone’s civil war.
Mr. Khadr may not be the most sympathetic figure for those pressing for the more forgiving interpretation of international law. He was born in Canada to a family with such deep Al Qaeda ties that some newspapers there have called them Canada’s first family of terrorism.
He is the youngest detainee at Guantánamo Bay, nearly blind in one eye from injuries sustained during the July 2002 firefight in which Sergeant Speer was mortally wounded and another American soldier was severely injured. Last week, Mr. Khadr said he wanted to fire all of his American lawyers, and some of them said they understood why he might distrust Americans after five years at Guantánamo.
Still, they argue that war-crimes prosecutors should focus on the adults who press children into service, not on the children themselves. The charges against Mr. Khadr, they said in a recent court filing, cross a line in the treatment of children that no other country has crossed “in modern history.”
The prosecutors, they say, included in their charges acts that occurred when Mr. Khadr was younger than 10. Mr. Khadr “was subject to undue adult influences,” said Muneer I. Ahmad, an associate professor at the American University Washington College of Law, who has represented Mr. Khadr.
“If Omar had had his free choice,” Professor Ahmad said, “what he would have chosen to do is ride horses, play soccer and read Harry Potter books.”
It is an appeal to emotion that the prosecutors are likely to meet with their own. Sergeant Speer left a wife and two small children. His widow, Tabitha, said in an e-mail exchange with a reporter last week that Mr. Khadr’s youth entitled him to no special consideration.
“Given the opportunity, he would do it all over again,” she wrote. “He was trained to do exactly what he did, regardless of his age.”
To the prosecutors, Mr. Khadr is the essence of a young man who should be held to adult standards. American officials say his father, Ahmed Said Khadr, who was killed in a shootout with Pakistani forces in 2003, was a senior deputy to Osama bin Laden.
One of Mr. Khadr’s brothers is in a wheelchair as a result of that 2003 shootout; another told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation “we are an Al Qaeda family.” Ahmed Khadr traveled internationally from Canada under the auspices of handling charity money for Muslims. In the mid-1990s, he was held for a time in Pakistan on suspicion of helping finance the bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad. After he was released, the Khadrs and several of their six children moved from Canada to Afghanistan, where they lived at times in the same compound as Osama bin Laden, officials have said. “All of the children were indoctrinated into the Al Qaeda way of thinking,” said the chief military prosecutor at Guantánamo, Col. Morris D. Davis of the Air Force.
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Molly Corfman/Associated Press
Col. Morris D. Davis is prosecuting Mr. Khadr, who is 20 now.
Threats & ResponsesGo to Complete Coverage »
After Sept. 11, Mr. Khadr made deliberate choices to join Al Qaeda and eventually to kill Sergeant Speer, Colonel Davis said in a recent interview. “There is a difference,” Colonel Davis said, “between a 15-year-old who makes a spur-of-the-moment decision and someone who made a long-term choice.”
Captured bloody and bullet-riddled after the firefight that killed Sergeant Speer, Mr. Khadr has been held at Guantánamo since 2002. At least three other juveniles, perhaps as young as 12, were also held there for a time. But they were released in January 2004, the military said.
Mr. Khadr’s lawyers have said in court that he has been subject to physical and psychological torture that exploited his youth, another example of what they say is a violation of international principles that children be accorded special protections.
In legal filings, the lawyers have asserted, for example, that an interrogator at Guantánamo told Mr. Khadr when he was 17 that if he did not cooperate he would be sent to Egypt where he would be confronted by “Soldier No. 9,” a man who the interrogators said would be sent to rape him.
Asked about the accusations, a Pentagon spokesman, Cmdr. Jeffrey D. Gordon, said they “may be raised by counsel during the course of the trial” but he would not discuss the specifics of the accusations. Commander Gordon added that detainees “have frequently made allegations of abuse while in detention in order to garner public support.”
In their filings, the prosecutors concede that some treaties require special treatment of children caught in warfare. Some of those treaties, they noted, have not been ratified by the United States, and others do not specifically ban prosecution of combatants who are 15 or older.
Some legal experts acknowledge that it is difficult to define precisely what international law requires in the treatment of child fighters. It is a fluid discipline, with few enforcement mechanisms, and there are inconsistent precedents and treaty provisions.
But even those who say there is no bar to the war crimes prosecutions of youthful fighters say the growing use of child fighters around the world means that Mr. Khadr’s case could become pivotal.
“More and more child soldiers are being recruited, and they are committing heinous crimes. This is an issue the international community is going to have to confront,” said Michael A. Newton, a former military prosecutor and expert on the law of war who teaches at Vanderbilt University Law School.
The two sides in the Khadr case interpret some international legal documents differently. One subject on which they differ is a treaty to which the United States is a party, a 2002 United Nations agreement dealing with child fighters.
The defense notes that the agreement requires countries to demobilize captured child fighters and to provide assistance for their physical and psychological recovery “and their social reintegration.”
The defense lawyers say that means sending them home. That would be inconsistent with the potential life term Mr. Khadr faces on charges of murder, attempted murder, spying, conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism.
But government lawyers note that the child-soldier treaty does not expressly rule out war crimes prosecutions for juveniles. Another international child-soldier provision that has become a central issue in Mr. Khadr’s case is a law approved by the United Nations for the prosecution of war crimes after the Sierra Leone civil war in the 1990s. It specifically provides that “persons of 15 years of age” and older can be charged with war crimes.
Colonel Davis said that was a significant precedent. “If the United Nations has signed on to the principle that people who are 15 can be prosecuted for war crimes,” he said, “the notion that we’re blazing a new trail with Mr. Khadr is a false assumption.”
But the former chief war crimes prosecutor for Sierra Leone, David M. Crane, said in an interview that soon after he was appointed by Secretary General Kofi Annan of the United Nations in 2002, he announced that he would not prosecute anyone under 18.
Mr. Crane, a former senior Pentagon legal official who is now a professor at Syracuse University Law School, said the Sierra Leone civil war included a catalogue of horrific acts by teenagers and children. But he said he concluded that warriors under 18 did not have the intellectual and emotional maturity to be prosecuted for war crimes.
“I called them as much victims as the people they raped, maimed and mutilated,” he said.
One person who has reached a different conclusion about the culpability of child fighters is Layne Morris, a housing administrator in a Salt Lake City suburb. Mr. Morris is a former Army Special Forces sergeant, who, like Mr. Khadr, is half-blind because of the firefight that day outside Khost, Afghanistan.
On a recent day, Mr. Morris remembered the stream of shots from AK-47s inside a compound a coalition patrol had surrounded. He remembered the hand grenades that kept coming over the wall. And he described the feeling of the shrapnel that took half his sight.
He said the battle did not unfold quickly, as it sometimes seems in the retelling. American forces surrounded the compound. And then they waited. Some women from the compound emerged and were allowed to leave, Mr. Morris said. A boy fighter would have had the chance to walk out of the gate, too, he said.
There were shots. And more waiting, as the Americans called for air support.
Anyone who was inside had a choice of fighting or surrendering, he said, including Mr. Khadr.
“There is just no way you can say this is a poor befuddled, brainwashed kid,” Mr. Morris said. “This is a kid who made a whole lot of decisions on his own.”
source: New York Times read the entire article @ www.newyorktimes.com
Skip to next paragraph
Threats & ResponsesGo to Complete Coverage »
Omar Ahmed Khadr
To American military prosecutors, Mr. Khadr is a committed Al Qaeda operative, spy and killer who must be held accountable for killing Sergeant Speer in 2002 and for other bloody acts he committed in Afghanistan.
But there is one fact that may not fit easily into the government’s portrait of Mr. Khadr: He was 15 at the time.
His age is at the center of a legal battle that is to begin tomorrow with an arraignment by a military judge at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, of Mr. Khadr, whom a range of legal experts describe as the first child fighter in decades to face war-crimes charges. It is a battle with implications as large as the growing ranks of child fighters around the world.
Defense lawyers argue that military prosecutors are violating international law by filing charges that date from events that occurred when Mr. Khadr was 15 or younger. Legal concepts that are still evolving, the lawyers say, require that countries treat child fighters as victims of warfare, rather than war criminals.
The military prosecutors say such notions may be “well-meaning and worthy,” but are irrelevant to the American military commissions at Guantánamo. Mr. Khadr is one of only three Guantánamo detainees to face charges under the law establishing the commissions, passed by Congress last year.
“International law,” the Justice Department asserted in a court filing in the case last week, “does not prohibit an individual under 18 from being prosecuted for war crimes.” Even so, prosecutors said that if they won a conviction, they would seek something less than a life term, given Mr. Khadr’s age. He is 20 now.
Whatever the outcome, his case seems destined to become a landmark, though some scholars say not enough attention has been given to its importance. “What is the precedent that we are setting with this unique step?” asked Peter W. Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has written about child fighters.
Mr. Khadr’s case offers a snapshot of relatively new questions surrounding the legal treatment of child fighters globally, though advocates for children have tended to focus less on young terrorists and more on children who fight in civil wars, like Ishmael Beah, whose best-selling memoir, “A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier,” recounts his bloody days as a child soldier in Sierra Leone’s civil war.
Mr. Khadr may not be the most sympathetic figure for those pressing for the more forgiving interpretation of international law. He was born in Canada to a family with such deep Al Qaeda ties that some newspapers there have called them Canada’s first family of terrorism.
He is the youngest detainee at Guantánamo Bay, nearly blind in one eye from injuries sustained during the July 2002 firefight in which Sergeant Speer was mortally wounded and another American soldier was severely injured. Last week, Mr. Khadr said he wanted to fire all of his American lawyers, and some of them said they understood why he might distrust Americans after five years at Guantánamo.
Still, they argue that war-crimes prosecutors should focus on the adults who press children into service, not on the children themselves. The charges against Mr. Khadr, they said in a recent court filing, cross a line in the treatment of children that no other country has crossed “in modern history.”
The prosecutors, they say, included in their charges acts that occurred when Mr. Khadr was younger than 10. Mr. Khadr “was subject to undue adult influences,” said Muneer I. Ahmad, an associate professor at the American University Washington College of Law, who has represented Mr. Khadr.
“If Omar had had his free choice,” Professor Ahmad said, “what he would have chosen to do is ride horses, play soccer and read Harry Potter books.”
It is an appeal to emotion that the prosecutors are likely to meet with their own. Sergeant Speer left a wife and two small children. His widow, Tabitha, said in an e-mail exchange with a reporter last week that Mr. Khadr’s youth entitled him to no special consideration.
“Given the opportunity, he would do it all over again,” she wrote. “He was trained to do exactly what he did, regardless of his age.”
To the prosecutors, Mr. Khadr is the essence of a young man who should be held to adult standards. American officials say his father, Ahmed Said Khadr, who was killed in a shootout with Pakistani forces in 2003, was a senior deputy to Osama bin Laden.
One of Mr. Khadr’s brothers is in a wheelchair as a result of that 2003 shootout; another told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation “we are an Al Qaeda family.” Ahmed Khadr traveled internationally from Canada under the auspices of handling charity money for Muslims. In the mid-1990s, he was held for a time in Pakistan on suspicion of helping finance the bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad. After he was released, the Khadrs and several of their six children moved from Canada to Afghanistan, where they lived at times in the same compound as Osama bin Laden, officials have said. “All of the children were indoctrinated into the Al Qaeda way of thinking,” said the chief military prosecutor at Guantánamo, Col. Morris D. Davis of the Air Force.
Skip to next paragraph
Molly Corfman/Associated Press
Col. Morris D. Davis is prosecuting Mr. Khadr, who is 20 now.
Threats & ResponsesGo to Complete Coverage »
After Sept. 11, Mr. Khadr made deliberate choices to join Al Qaeda and eventually to kill Sergeant Speer, Colonel Davis said in a recent interview. “There is a difference,” Colonel Davis said, “between a 15-year-old who makes a spur-of-the-moment decision and someone who made a long-term choice.”
Captured bloody and bullet-riddled after the firefight that killed Sergeant Speer, Mr. Khadr has been held at Guantánamo since 2002. At least three other juveniles, perhaps as young as 12, were also held there for a time. But they were released in January 2004, the military said.
Mr. Khadr’s lawyers have said in court that he has been subject to physical and psychological torture that exploited his youth, another example of what they say is a violation of international principles that children be accorded special protections.
In legal filings, the lawyers have asserted, for example, that an interrogator at Guantánamo told Mr. Khadr when he was 17 that if he did not cooperate he would be sent to Egypt where he would be confronted by “Soldier No. 9,” a man who the interrogators said would be sent to rape him.
Asked about the accusations, a Pentagon spokesman, Cmdr. Jeffrey D. Gordon, said they “may be raised by counsel during the course of the trial” but he would not discuss the specifics of the accusations. Commander Gordon added that detainees “have frequently made allegations of abuse while in detention in order to garner public support.”
In their filings, the prosecutors concede that some treaties require special treatment of children caught in warfare. Some of those treaties, they noted, have not been ratified by the United States, and others do not specifically ban prosecution of combatants who are 15 or older.
Some legal experts acknowledge that it is difficult to define precisely what international law requires in the treatment of child fighters. It is a fluid discipline, with few enforcement mechanisms, and there are inconsistent precedents and treaty provisions.
But even those who say there is no bar to the war crimes prosecutions of youthful fighters say the growing use of child fighters around the world means that Mr. Khadr’s case could become pivotal.
“More and more child soldiers are being recruited, and they are committing heinous crimes. This is an issue the international community is going to have to confront,” said Michael A. Newton, a former military prosecutor and expert on the law of war who teaches at Vanderbilt University Law School.
The two sides in the Khadr case interpret some international legal documents differently. One subject on which they differ is a treaty to which the United States is a party, a 2002 United Nations agreement dealing with child fighters.
The defense notes that the agreement requires countries to demobilize captured child fighters and to provide assistance for their physical and psychological recovery “and their social reintegration.”
The defense lawyers say that means sending them home. That would be inconsistent with the potential life term Mr. Khadr faces on charges of murder, attempted murder, spying, conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism.
But government lawyers note that the child-soldier treaty does not expressly rule out war crimes prosecutions for juveniles. Another international child-soldier provision that has become a central issue in Mr. Khadr’s case is a law approved by the United Nations for the prosecution of war crimes after the Sierra Leone civil war in the 1990s. It specifically provides that “persons of 15 years of age” and older can be charged with war crimes.
Colonel Davis said that was a significant precedent. “If the United Nations has signed on to the principle that people who are 15 can be prosecuted for war crimes,” he said, “the notion that we’re blazing a new trail with Mr. Khadr is a false assumption.”
But the former chief war crimes prosecutor for Sierra Leone, David M. Crane, said in an interview that soon after he was appointed by Secretary General Kofi Annan of the United Nations in 2002, he announced that he would not prosecute anyone under 18.
Mr. Crane, a former senior Pentagon legal official who is now a professor at Syracuse University Law School, said the Sierra Leone civil war included a catalogue of horrific acts by teenagers and children. But he said he concluded that warriors under 18 did not have the intellectual and emotional maturity to be prosecuted for war crimes.
“I called them as much victims as the people they raped, maimed and mutilated,” he said.
One person who has reached a different conclusion about the culpability of child fighters is Layne Morris, a housing administrator in a Salt Lake City suburb. Mr. Morris is a former Army Special Forces sergeant, who, like Mr. Khadr, is half-blind because of the firefight that day outside Khost, Afghanistan.
On a recent day, Mr. Morris remembered the stream of shots from AK-47s inside a compound a coalition patrol had surrounded. He remembered the hand grenades that kept coming over the wall. And he described the feeling of the shrapnel that took half his sight.
He said the battle did not unfold quickly, as it sometimes seems in the retelling. American forces surrounded the compound. And then they waited. Some women from the compound emerged and were allowed to leave, Mr. Morris said. A boy fighter would have had the chance to walk out of the gate, too, he said.
There were shots. And more waiting, as the Americans called for air support.
Anyone who was inside had a choice of fighting or surrendering, he said, including Mr. Khadr.
“There is just no way you can say this is a poor befuddled, brainwashed kid,” Mr. Morris said. “This is a kid who made a whole lot of decisions on his own.”
source: New York Times read the entire article @ www.newyorktimes.com
Berlin to lift blockade on VAT reform
By George Parker in Brussels
Published: June 1 2007 18:23 Last updated: June 1 2007 18:23
Germany will next week lift its blockade on sweeping reforms to Europe’s sales tax regime in a move that threatens the e-commerce boom in Luxembourg, its tiny low-tax neighbour.
Companies such as Amazon, AOL and Skype have descended on Luxembourg in recent years to take advantage of the grand duchy’s low VAT rate to sell services across Europe.
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Their tax shelter in the Ardennes seemed secure until Germany, holder of the rotating EU presidency, threw its weight behind moves to turn the sales tax system for e-commerce on its head.
Finance ministers will next week be asked to approve a plan to charge VAT on internet and telecoms services in the country where they are consumed, instead of the country where they are supplied.
Luxembourg is fighting a rearguard action to block the so-called VAT package, which would end the advantage enjoyed by local e-commerce companies. “Negotiations are going to be quite tough,” said a spokesman for Jean-Claude Juncker, Luxembourg’s premier and finance minister.
“These companies do their billing through Luxembourg and if this goes through we would lose quite a lot of tax revenue – about €300m ($403m, £204m) a year.”
Berlin blocked the VAT deal for months in protest at its failure to get European agreement on an entirely separate and ambitious plan to fight German tax fraud.
But Peer Steinbrück, German finance minister, is now ready to try to settle the issue at next week’s Ecofin meeting in Luxembourg after winning concessions on the tax fraud issue.
The fact that Germany recently increased its VAT rate from 16 per cent to 19 per cent – increasing the incentive for its e-commerce companies to move across the border to enjoy Luxembourg’s 15 per cent rate – may also have been a factor.
Luxembourg is not alone in opposing parts of the package, but its problem is seen as the most fundamental. France is concerned about the operation of new VAT one-stop shops, which are essential to make the new system work.
They would allow an e-commerce company to register for tax in its home state, which would arrange for tax to be transferred at the local rate to the country where the service was consumed.
Germany’s decision to push for a deal on the VAT package came when other member states told Mr Steinbrück this week they would consider allowing a pilot project to test his radical plan to fight VAT fraud.
A draft communiqué says the European Commission should consider “running a pilot project for a limited period of time” to test the “reverse charge” VAT model, where tax is charged at the end of the supply chain.
Austria, which also believes the method could cut fraud, is the likely guinea pig for any pilot project.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Published: June 1 2007 18:23 Last updated: June 1 2007 18:23
Germany will next week lift its blockade on sweeping reforms to Europe’s sales tax regime in a move that threatens the e-commerce boom in Luxembourg, its tiny low-tax neighbour.
Companies such as Amazon, AOL and Skype have descended on Luxembourg in recent years to take advantage of the grand duchy’s low VAT rate to sell services across Europe.
ADVERTISEMENT
Their tax shelter in the Ardennes seemed secure until Germany, holder of the rotating EU presidency, threw its weight behind moves to turn the sales tax system for e-commerce on its head.
Finance ministers will next week be asked to approve a plan to charge VAT on internet and telecoms services in the country where they are consumed, instead of the country where they are supplied.
Luxembourg is fighting a rearguard action to block the so-called VAT package, which would end the advantage enjoyed by local e-commerce companies. “Negotiations are going to be quite tough,” said a spokesman for Jean-Claude Juncker, Luxembourg’s premier and finance minister.
“These companies do their billing through Luxembourg and if this goes through we would lose quite a lot of tax revenue – about €300m ($403m, £204m) a year.”
Berlin blocked the VAT deal for months in protest at its failure to get European agreement on an entirely separate and ambitious plan to fight German tax fraud.
But Peer Steinbrück, German finance minister, is now ready to try to settle the issue at next week’s Ecofin meeting in Luxembourg after winning concessions on the tax fraud issue.
The fact that Germany recently increased its VAT rate from 16 per cent to 19 per cent – increasing the incentive for its e-commerce companies to move across the border to enjoy Luxembourg’s 15 per cent rate – may also have been a factor.
Luxembourg is not alone in opposing parts of the package, but its problem is seen as the most fundamental. France is concerned about the operation of new VAT one-stop shops, which are essential to make the new system work.
They would allow an e-commerce company to register for tax in its home state, which would arrange for tax to be transferred at the local rate to the country where the service was consumed.
Germany’s decision to push for a deal on the VAT package came when other member states told Mr Steinbrück this week they would consider allowing a pilot project to test his radical plan to fight VAT fraud.
A draft communiqué says the European Commission should consider “running a pilot project for a limited period of time” to test the “reverse charge” VAT model, where tax is charged at the end of the supply chain.
Austria, which also believes the method could cut fraud, is the likely guinea pig for any pilot project.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Global overview: Equities soar on US growth hopes
Global overview: Equities soar on US growth hopes
By Dave Shellock
Published: June 1 2007 17:22 Last updated: June 1 2007 21:26
Investors rediscovered their appetite for risk this week as mounting optimism about the prospects for the US economy helped drive world equity markets to fresh highs and send government bonds tumbling.
Even a sharp sell-off for Chinese stocks failed to provoke more than a fleeting wobble as a series of robust economic reports encouraged hopes that the US was heading for a soft landing.
Source : www.ft.com
By Dave Shellock
Published: June 1 2007 17:22 Last updated: June 1 2007 21:26
Investors rediscovered their appetite for risk this week as mounting optimism about the prospects for the US economy helped drive world equity markets to fresh highs and send government bonds tumbling.
Even a sharp sell-off for Chinese stocks failed to provoke more than a fleeting wobble as a series of robust economic reports encouraged hopes that the US was heading for a soft landing.
Source : www.ft.com
DOW JONES SURGES ON TALK FOR HIGHER BID
By Joshua Chaffin, Aline van Duyn and James Politi in New York
Published: June 1 2007 19:41 Last updated: June 2 2007 00:46
Dow Jones shares surged on Friday as investors bet that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp would raise its $5bn offer for the publisher of the Wall Street Journal or that rival bidders would enter the fray.
By the close of trading on Wall Street, Dow Jones shares had gained 14.8 per cent to $61.20 – above the $60 per share put on the table by News Corp.
Source : www.ft.com
Published: June 1 2007 19:41 Last updated: June 2 2007 00:46
Dow Jones shares surged on Friday as investors bet that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp would raise its $5bn offer for the publisher of the Wall Street Journal or that rival bidders would enter the fray.
By the close of trading on Wall Street, Dow Jones shares had gained 14.8 per cent to $61.20 – above the $60 per share put on the table by News Corp.
Source : www.ft.com
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