European Union News - Internal Market

A non-EU national staying in one of the Member States on a long-stay visa will be allowed to travel to most other Member States for three months in any six-month period under the same conditions as the holder of a residence permit, under a new regulation approved on Tuesday by Parliament.

EU Employment and Social Affairs Ministers have agreed on a new facility to provide loans to people who have lost their jobs and want to start or further develop their own small business. The European Microfinance Facility will have a starting budget of €100 million which could leverage more than €500 million in cooperation with international financial institutions such as the European Investment Bank (EIB) Group. The initiative is part of the EU's response to the crisis and is especially targeted at people who cannot normally obtain credit because of the economic crisis and the current lack of credit supply .

This conference aims to promote a connected community of stakeholders and identify possible joint actions to support innovation through public procurement. To start building a European critical mass in this field, there is a need to facilitate the networking and exchanging of best practice among public procurers, policy makers and relevant stakeholders.

An exchange of views was held on the new 2020 Strategy for jobs and growth at the latest meeting of the Competitiveness Council on 1 and 2 March in Brussels, Belgium. The debate focused on the new strategy from the perspective of the internal market and will help contribute to the general framework of the new strategy.

The European Commission has cleared the proposed merger of Orange UK and T-Mobile UK, respectively France Télécom's (FT) and Deutsche Telekom's (DT) UK subsidiaries. The decision is conditional upon the amendment of an existing network sharing agreement with Hutchison 3G UK (3UK), to ensure that there remain sufficient competitors in the market, and the divestiture of a quarter of the combined spectrum of the merging parties in the 1800 MHz band, which is one of three frequency bands currently used for mobile communications in the UK.

Member States have never performed better in writing agreed Internal Market rules into national law on time, but still need to improve the way those rules are applied in practice, according to the European Commission’s latest Internal Market Scoreboard.

The European Commission has recently notified Google about the complaints received from three companies, the UK site Foundem, the French legal search engine ejustice.fr, as well as Microsoft's ciao! from Bing. Following these complaints the Commission has risen a preliminary antitrust inquiry on Google about eventual anti-competitive practices.

The England & Wales Court of Appeal has brought to the European Court of Justice a question referring to the Case C-495/09, where Nokia Corporation pleads its right for the seizure of counterfeit goods coming from a non-Member State to another non-Member State.