European Union News - Internal Market

The public hearing of the Single Market Observatory (SMO) of the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) in Budapest provided Hungarian civil society organisations a unique opportunity to express their views on how to best relaunch the European Single Market and to debate the Single Market Act with their counterparts at European level.

Energy Commissioner Oettinger and Prime Minister of Slovenia Borut Pahor inaugurated on 3 March the Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators (ACER) in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The Agency will help removing technical obstacles to cross-border energy trade, and will coordinate activities of national energy regulators helping to solve possible conflicts between them. The opening of the agency coincides with the coming into force of the third energy package on internal market.

Registering a car in another Member State should be an easy procedure which quite often turns into a bureaucratic nightmare, with cumbersome re-registration formalities and paperwork. In order to facilitate this procedure, the European Commission has launched a public consultation aiming to identify the main difficulties encountered by EU citizens and companies when moving a car bought and registered in one Member State to another. The results of this consultation will feed into actions  to remove one more barrier within the single market.

The European Commission confirmed that on 1 March 2011 some officials initiated unannounced inspections at the premises of companies that are active in the e-book (electronic or digital books) publishing sector in several Member States. These inspections are based on Commission's belief that the companies concerned may have violated EU antitrust rules that prohibit cartels and other restrictive business practices.

Work on EU legislation to regulate derivatives trading began officially in the Economic Affairs Committee held on 28 February, with the presentation of a draft report by rapporteur Werner Langen. This report recommends that new rules should govern only privately-traded derivatives, rather than all kinds as proposed by some Member States. I also advocates for limited exemptions and scrapping proposed co-operation arrangements between clearing houses.

At its meeting held in Brussels on 28 February, the Energy Council was was briefed on the state of play of discussions on the draft regulation on energy market integrity and transparency aimed at setting up a framework for monitoring wholesale energy markets in order to detect market abuse and manipulation. The Commission considers that, although market abuse and manipulation relating to financial instruments in general are already covered by other legal provisions, the particular nature of the market for gas and electricity required a separate instrument.

The European Commission has adopted on 25 February a proposal to interconnect business registers within the EU, which aims to facilitate cross-border electronic access to business information, by ensuring business registers are updated, and business information is more easily and readily accessible.  These changes are crucial for companies when setting up branches, conducting cross-border trade or providing cross-border services in the EU.

In order to help citizens and businesses to fully benefit from the opportunities offered by the Single Market, the European Commission published on 21 February a strategy to improve governance of the single market. To achieve this general objective, the strategy provides for the expansion of the Internal Market Information (IMI) system to other areas of EU law such as, potentially, gambling and e-commerce will help to achieve this.

According to the last data released by the European Commission regarding the functioning of the services Your Europe Advice and SOLVIT, social security stand as the issues which European citizens and business are most concerned and have requested information about to both services. In 2010 Your Europe Advice reached an all-time high of 12.000 questions, and SOLVIT helped 1.363 citizens and businesses in their difficulties regarding the implementation of Single Market rights.