Chapter News, COVID-19 News

New Consumer Agenda: European Commission to empower consumers to become the driver of transition

Today, the European Commission launched the New Consumer Agenda to empower European consumers to play an active role in the green and digital transitions. The Agenda also addresses how to increase consumer protection and resilience during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, which brought significant challenges affecting the daily lives of consumers. More concretely, the Agenda puts forward priorities and key action points to be taken in the next 5 years together with Member States at European and national levels. This will,...

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Chapter News

LIFE programme: over €280 million in EU funding for environment, nature and climate action projects

The European Commission has approved an investment package of more than €280 million from the EU budget for over 120 new LIFE programme projects. This EU funding will trigger total investments of nearly €590 million to help meet these projects' ambitious goals for environment, nature, and climate action. This amount represents a 37% rise compared to last year. The projects will help to achieve the European Green Deal objectives by supporting the EU Biodiversity Strategy and the Circular Economy Action Plan, contributing to the green recovery from the Coronavirus...

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Chapter News

ECB announces independent review of payments system outage

Independent review to be launched on payments infrastructure TARGET2 incident on 23 October 2020 caused outage lasting almost 10 hours Findings of the review to be published by the second quarter of 2021 The European Central Bank (ECB) will launch an independent review of an incident that affected its real-time gross settlement system TARGET2 on 23 October 2020, causing an outage for almost 10 hours. An initial investigation determined that a software defect in a network device was the...

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Chapter News

EU budget: European Commission welcomes agreement on €1.8 trillion package to help build greener, more digital and more resilient Europe

The European Commission has today welcomed the agreement between the European Parliament and EU Member States in the Council on Europe's next long-term budget and NextGenerationEU, the temporary recovery instrument. Once adopted, the package of a total of €1.8 trillion will be the largest package ever financed through the EU budget. It will help rebuild a post-COVID-19 Europe, which will be greener, more digital, more resilient and better fit for the current and forthcoming challenges. President Ursula von der Leyen said: “I welcome today's...

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COVID-19 News, Member News

Portolano Cavallo | Foreign investment control in the life science sector: the scope of the Italian Government’s powers also in the context of the current COVID-19 pandemic

This article is part of Portolano’s bimonthly “INFORM@ Life Sciences” Newsletter. Click here to subscribe. | Some recent cases in the news, as well as steps taken to increase the regulatory powers of the government in the current emergency situation via the Decreto Liquidità, have prompted us to draft this overview of measures that provide the government with special powers that it may exercise to prohibit or impose conditions upon extraordinary corporate transactions of foreign parties involving Italian target companies...

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Member News

Stout | Tire M&A on the Rise After Initial Pandemic Shock

Third-quarter M&A activity broke higher from what was an extremely subdued and uncertain second quarter. Retail drove the bulk of transaction activity in a sector which saw demand return and retailers drive significant business via necessary replacement tire and maintenance service spend during the quarter. The highlight of the quarter is Meritage Group’s – an investment advisor with over $12 billion of assets under management – acquisition of Les Schwab Tire Centers in September. Despite delays in the transaction due...

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Chapter News

ECB | Speech by Chrstine Lagarde: Monetary policy in a pandemic emergency

Keynote speech by Christine Lagarde, President of the ECB, at the ECB Forum on Central Banking | Frankfurt am Main, 11 November 2020 | Let me begin by welcoming all of you to this year’s ECB Forum on Central Banking. Regrettably, we cannot be together in Sintra this time, but I trust that this virtual environment will be no less conducive to challenging ideas and productive debate. The purpose of this year’s conference is to examine the challenges facing central banking...

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Member News

Vulcan Insight | EU reaches deal on long-term budget

For the past ten weeks, negotiators from the European Parliament and Council have been embattled over finding a compromise on the EU’s next seven-year budget. On Tuesday, the two institutions’ delegations reached a political agreement, almost sealing the deal on the roll-out of the €1.8 trillion package aimed at financing the COVID-19 economic recovery through additional funding for future jobs and competitiveness, as well as leading the EU’s green and digital transformation. Compared to the momentous agreement reached by the...

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Chapter News

“Central Banks in a Shifting World” – Discussion of Evi Papa’s Fiscal Rules, Policy and Macroeconomic Stabilization in the Euro Area

Remarks by Vitor Gaspar at ECB Forum on Central Banking 2020 | November 12 | 1.  Introduction It is such a pleasure to participate in the ECB Forum on Central Banking and discuss the paper by Evi Papa on Fiscal Rules and Macroeconomic Stabilization in the Euro Area. The paper reviews relevant theoretical and empirical literature and, at the end, examines the Next Generation EU program. The paper is well-written, and it covers a vast landscape. If offers much to learn and...

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Member News

NautaDutilh | Finally some practical EDPB guidance on how to make international data transfers lawful

After a long, four-month wait, we finally have recommendations from the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) on “supplementary measures” in the context of international transfers of personal data – i.e. measures required to ensure that transfers to countries outside of the European Economic Area (EEA) are permitted under the GDPR. Follow-up on Schrems II Under the GDPR, transfers of personal data from the EEA to a non-EEA recipient are prohibited unless the sender has a certain degree of confidence – thanks to...

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