Euro Watch

Everyone knows that the “Autobahn” is every male’s dream. A long stretch of road without any speed limit. However, for anyone dreaming of reaching a top speed, this will soon change. The government has imposed a new speed limit on the “Autobahn” making it illegal for drivers to go more than one hundred and twenty kilometres per hour or seventy-five miles per hour.

However, if one really considers the road, this is not that big a deal of a change. It will only be applied to about six miles of Autobahn stretching between Bremen and Bremerhaven. This leaves at least thirty miles of Autobahn road still to drive at top speeds.

The government has implemented this speed limit in an effort to go “green”. By reducing the speed they are hoping to cut down on the pollution levels plaguing the area. Moreover, this will also make this stretch of the “Autobahn” safer to drive.

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The amount of customers who own a mobile phone to access banking services from their main bank is expected to increase more than 10 times the number when it is measured in the next four years.

Consumer mobile banking services for over eight hundred million people are expected to be the norm by the year 2011.

Studies reveal that more organizations in the banking industry will provide services and products geared towards mobile usage. This include paying bills and manage a bank account.

By far, most people will use it to access banking information, and the amount of money transacted will be twice as much in previous years. However financial institutions still have a long way to go to come to an agreement on charges related to banking with a mobile phone, providing better customer service, and more security for mobile banking.

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The head of Eurostar is quite happy for the success of Eurostar since its move to St Pancras from Waterloo. During the initial move, the company celebrated a strategic move on their part to become based at St Pancras, London.

Data released yesterday confirmed that this was a successful move as the company posted a record number of customers using its service. Within the first 3 months, Eurostar was said by analysts to be the travel method of choice.

The amount of people traveling on the Eurostar rose by twenty-five percent after its move to St. Pancras. A spokesman for the company states that the added convenience and the increase speed of their trains has helped increase the number of customers.

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The well known German company Siemens plans to file a lawsuit worth millions in light of the scandal that occurred last year. The company was headlined in the newspaper after it was discovered that former executives were involved in deceit and corruption.

One of the people whom Siemens is hoping to sue is the ex-chairman of the company, Heinrich von Pierer. It is alleged that he might have known about the corruption taking place. Pierer states that he was not aware of any corruption or bribery taking place.

The board will consider the details of the lawsuit as it meets with its lawyers, and within the next two weeks it will have a decision about whether it will go ahead with the civil lawsuit. The lawsuit will be the largest in German history.

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The European Parliament has stated that it does not feel that anyone who shares files, without profiting from it, should be consider a criminal. Their decision came as a row has erupted between Internet Service Providers and the music industry. ISPs have been told to disconnect the internet of someone found to be illegally sharing files. The disconnection will not happen until after three warnings.

However, the European Parliament stated that even though it is committed to the fight against the illegal pirating of software, they will not arrest anyone who does so without the intention of making a profit.

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The City of London is expected to have a large financial downturn within the next two years. Analysts are already expecting that this loss of jobs willl be worse than the previous crash of the dotcom market. It is estimated that at least twenty thousand jobs will be lost within the financial and banking sector over the next twenty-four months.

According to the information published by the Centre of Economic and Business Research (CEBR), at least ten thousand jobs will be done away with by the end of the year. It is predicted that the level of employment previously had at the year will not return until 2012.

The areas that will be hardest hit involve anything to do with credit, for example investment banking and corporate finance. To start the ball rolling, at least two thousands jobs have been lost at Citigroup’s London and New York Offices.

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A new property investment fund has been established this week, with Anglo-Romanian Development (ARD) to be the Asset Manager.

This new fund has been set up by Catalyst Global Funds LLP, who have been open about their attempts to make use of ARD’s considerable experience with the Romanian property market and set up a framework that will deliver high-end returns. During 2007, ARD increased their annual property investments by 40%.

Lawrence King, an employee from Catalyst Global, made a statement regarding ARD’s involvement, which is to be lead by Alex Pintea. King said that Catalyst believes ARD to be the ultimate choice for fund managing in the region and that they are expecting to quickly see approximately £20,000,000 invested in the property market.

Due to the style of investments implemented by both ARD and Pintea, the company is competing strongly against competition, by being highly exclusive in the opportunities that they partake of. Pintea has said that this form of investment, in the expanding market of Romania, will lead their client’s to higher profits, and growth rate, than those in the U.K market.

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With the fiasco that was caused by the opening of terminal five, British Airways has decided to increase the time it will take before moving its operations to the new terminal.

With the problems at the new “state of the art” terminal, BA said that it is best to delay moving its long haul flights to the new terminal, until all the “bugs” are sorted out. BA has said that it will extend its moving date to Terminal Five for at least a month.

Spokesperson and CEO Willie Walsh was quick to soothe fears that the delay to move to terminal five was in the best interest of BA’s customers, and can help to increase the confidence passengers feel with the airline carriers.

Since March 27, British Airways has had to cancel at least a hundred flights when the baggage system failed to operate.

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Wal-Mart has announced that its new executive will look at the viability of opening a store within Russia. Wal-Mart hopes to expand to Russia, and any of the other European partners that this country trades with.

The new executive Stephan Fanderl has become the presiden of the emerging markets – East division for Walmart. He will have the task of looking to see if Russia will be a profitable country for Wal-Mart to base itself.

At the moment Wal-mart is based in many countries such as Brazil, China, United Kingdom, and has over three thousand stores around the world.

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A large number of people will start to feel the weakness of the UK’s pound when they go on holidays this year. The more rapid growth in the euro causes them pay an increase in price of all the hotels, meals in major European destinations.

As more traders continue to increase Europe single currency to record highs, anyone on holiday is expected to pay more than one fifth they normally would compared to last year.

There has been over a ten percent fall since last year, but the Euro has regained strength leaving the pound to drag behind. The slow growth of the pound is being blamed on by its ties to the US markets.

Initially, the euro reached a new level to trade at 80p yesterday, the International Monetary Fund warned on, it is only 1.6% growth in the UK and not the 2.25 percent this year, compared to the government’s claims.

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Tesco mobile has released information that after testing they have discovered that their customers are ready for mobile advertising and mobile phone ads.

The Mobile Virtual Network Operator recently completed a project last May where it tested ads on its mobile network.

Tesco said they saw a growth of new visitors to approximately 300,000 people by using mobile phone ads.

Clicking on banner ads was the main campaign that they ran, and women in their mid 30′s were the highest population of visitors to visit or buy from the site.

The most useful brands bought were toiletries and cleaning supplies. According to this campaign, Tesco has discovered that at least sixty percent of their visitors are women, and at least seventy percent of them will click on the ads.

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With the recen news about the economy, and the decline in shares in pharmaceutical companies, Novartis announced that it had recently purchased Alcon.

Alcon is well known as a major company specialized in solutions and services for eye care.

With this new business venture, pharmaceutical giant is expected to buy Alcon for at least $143 dollars per share.

This purchase by Novartis was not a result of recent deals but came after many years of negotiation between the two companies. Chairman of Novartis Daniel Vasella was happy about the company’s new acquisition.

He saw this as a way to increase the market value of the company while the economy was suffering a downturn.

Shares in Novartis are currently trading at $148 per share.

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There is a growing concern for the state of the Italian airline company Alitalia, as the business venture to sell the airline continues to be plagued with delays.

The last prospective buyer was Air France-KLM, but the deal fell through and Air France-KLM withdrew its offer.

The Italian airline company has been trying to find a prospective buyer for at least a month and a half, and time is running out.

In order to avoid financial ruin, at least one billion dollars must be obtained by Alitalia by the month of June.

Just as it continues to operate, the company is losing more and more money until a buyer can be found. Analysts are predicting that they are losing at least one million a day as they continue.

At the moment trading stock in the company has been put on hold after the chairman of the airline tendered his resignation.

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The European Commission is concerned about the amount of information that search engines store on people that use them.

Based on a report issued by Commission, it has found that at least 5-7 months of personal information is being held by search engines.

This calls into question just how secure they really are.

The European Commission has also questioned why data for anyone using search engines has been stored, and what happens to the data after it has been collected.

The Commission is calling on search engines to first seek user’s permission to collect and store data, and implement other recommendations listed in the report.

Currently data is stored from between one to two years.

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For those of us that have enjoyed the peaceful holiday travel – this is about to change.

The EU has announced that it will allow passengers the ability to use their mobile phones while in the air.

This new ruling will not be completely installed until approximately six months time, but does give passengers flying within the European Union the right to access and use their mobile phones that have been carried on board with them.

Hopefully this new ruling will reduce the roaming costs that many travelers face when using their mobile phone in another country.

Previously airlines banned passengers from using their mobiles because it is the belief that this causes problems with operating airplanes.

However, carriers such have Air France have suggested that this might not be the case.

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People all over the world are calling on governments to decrease the rising food prices.

Food prices have increased dramatically in the past few years all over the world. In Asia, there is an increase in rice prices. The economy is also trying to recover from increasing wheat prices. This will affect a large number of consumers that depend on bread and pasta. In many places within Europe, there has been an increase in dairy and milk based products.

The shortage of food has what has recently caused the riots within Haiti, Eygpt, and Cameroon. Therefore, the World Bank prepares to work with governments to reduce the food crisis before it escalates. It has plans to inject at least $500 million US dollars into the UN World Food Programme.

However, this will be only a temporary solution to determining how to resolve the increase in food and fuel prices many countries are faced with.

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Russia is making headlines within the European Union again.

This time it is in regards to a large scam uncovered that involved many influential people in Russia. Information released by Hermitage Capital Management show that an elaborate scheme of fraud was launched against its subsidiaries.

According to Hermitage Capital Managament, Ltd, papers and company seals were obtained by high ranking members of the police to cococt a scheme to sue the company for millions.

The scheme involved carrying out raids on banks and foreign companies held by the Hermitage Fund.

It is alleged that high ranking police officials planned to carry out a fake tax investigation on the company that involved gaining control of confidential papers.

Afterwards, members of the group were planning on using this to steal the assets held by the Fund.

At least one lawyer was beaten an arrested when a raid was carried out at his office.

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There is a growing concern about the amount of children working in Egypt. The European Union is considering working with countries such as Egypt where many of its workers are below the age of 16. Children as young as eight will spend long hours working for brick factories located on the outskirts of the city of Cairo.

Because of the lack of available jobs and a poor social system, many of these children are the sole or co-breadwinner for their families. They will usually have one or both parents that are unable to work because of health problems.

The European Union and the Egyptian government are trying to consider ways to prevent or protect children who are working in these harsh conditions for only a few dollars a day.

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The British government is expected to take a more active role in preventing youth and children from being victims of pedophiles. In their latest attempt, the government would like to ban anyone convicted of paedophila from being able to use any social networking site such as Bebo or Facebook. The government would like to enforce pedophiles give polic all the email addresses they use, and have them blocked by social networking sites. With this law, anyone convicted by police for paedophile can be given five years in prison if they use an email address not registered with law enforcement.

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The European leaders of Nato have announced that they will be approving the U.S.’s bid to install new missile defenses within Europe, ahead of George W. Bush’s talks with the Russian President, Vladimir Putin.

Nato leaders convened at at summit in Bucharest last Thursday, where they announced that they would support the plans, and even extend them to countries not initially suggested by the U.S., such as Turkey and regions of the Balkans.

George W. Bush will be politically reinforced by the European acceptance of this new defense system when he meets with Putin this weekend.

At this point last year, the alliance was divided over this issue, but with redoubled efforts by the U.S. to have a more open dialog with their fellow Nato members, and with Russia, the system has been given the go ahead after receiving revisions by European leaders of Nato.

An official from the U.S. has stated that this issue was expected to be highly divisive for Nato, however the European members of the international group have accepted the U.S.’s sincerity in this issue and their renewed efforts at working with the organization, especially its European and Russian members.

The inclusion of Russia into the scheme comes on the back of Putin making disparaging remarks regarding the U.S.’ intentions for the region, and especially towards his own country. The U.S. responded by saying that this system was designed to counter any missile or nuclear intentions from Iran and that it would not interfere with Russia.

Nato released a statement last Thursday in which they stated that they are of a similar view to the U.S. in regards to the potential threat that Iran poses to the region.

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