For years, politicians across the EU have been discussing phasing out cars with internal combustion engines within the EU’s borders. On Wednesday, the EU environment ministers were in Luxembourg to discuss big parts of EU’s key climate legislation of the ‘Fit for 55’ package. After wrestling for more than 16 hours, the Council finally agreed: From 2035, new cars in the EU should be emission-free. EU states have now spoken out in favor of reducing the so-called fleet limits for cars to...

Read more

The FTC is increasingly focused on competition in gasoline and fuel markets and has “redoubl its commitment” to “aggressive antitrust enforcement” in these areas. The most recent example of this renewed commitment came earlier this month with the announcement of a consent agreement, requiring the divestiture of petroleum terminals in two states. The proposed transaction involved petroleum terminal and pipeline companies and the acquisition of 26 light petroleum product terminals largely located in the Southeast for approximately $435 million. The...

Read more

This article is part of Portolano Cavallo’s “INFORM@Digital & IP” Newsletter. Click here to subscribe | On June 9, 2022, the Italian Data Protection Authority (Garante per la protezione dei dati personali – “Garante”) issued a decision banning the use of Google Analytics without implementation of adequate additional safeguards. The decision is in line with the position of other EU supervisory authorities (including the French CNIL). It came in response to a claim against Caffeina Media S.r.l. (the “Company”) arguing that the use...

Read more

EB-5 regional centers officially reauthorized after preliminary injunction reverses USCIS’ decision to deauthorize all regional centers On Friday, June 24, 2022, the Federal Court in the Northern District of California granted a preliminary injunction to stop United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) from requiring all regional centers to seek redesignation. In April 2022, USCIS announced that all regional centers authorized under the previous EB-5 legislation would be required to re-apply for designation under the new law before they could receive investments...

Read more

Baar/Stafford - Sika from the canton of Zug has opened a manufacturing plant for concrete admixtures in Stafford in the U.S. state of Virginia. In combination with its other plant near Philadelphia, Sika will now have production capacity to meet the strong demand from continued growth in the construction sector in North America. Sika has opened a new manufacturing plant for concrete admixtures on stream in Stafford in the U.S. state of Virginia. Together with the existing plant in Fairless Hills...

Read more

During its summit in Elmau (Germany), the Group of Seven (G7) endorsed the Emerging Market Climate Action Fund (EMCAF) as an example of a concrete innovative and market-led approach to mobilise private investments for climate relevant infrastructure and to enhance multilateral finance and collaboration. In addition, Germany announced to increase their investment in the fund. EMCAF is an innovative blended finance fund initiated jointly by the European Investment Bank (EIB) and Allianz Global Investors (AllianzGI) to finance climate mitigation and...

Read more

By R.K. Gardner, New World Technology Partners | Digital technology, often expressed as Information and Communications Technology (ICT) embodies a more expansive and vulnerable array of elements than has been considered in traditional cyberspace. The pace of introduction and (often hasty) adoption of new and emerging technologies, applications and information artifacts, upon which enterprises and government institutions/agencies rely to conduct business, has become a global system-of-systems, composed of numerous interdependent components and myriad channels. They operate in a rapidly changing...

Read more

What does this mean for your company? The special bilateral agreements signed between Luxembourg and the Belgian, French and German authorities concerning cross-border workers in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic will come to an end on 30 June 2022 – including, in principle, their social security exemptions (unless the relevant agreements are once again extended). As a consequence, from 1 July 2022, the general rules on the taxation of employment income received by Belgian, French and German cross-border commuters (i.e.,...

Read more

Equal opportunity in the job market is not yet a given for everyone in the Netherlands; discrimination when recruiting and selecting new employees still occurs. The bill to oversee equal opportunities for recruitment and selection (Wetsvoorstel toezicht gelijke kansen voor werving en selectie) seeks to change this. The bill aims to create equal opportunities in the recruitment and selection process and to prevent discrimination in the labor market. The most important part of this bill is that employers and...

Read more