Posts Tagged ‘Commission’

British government backs plan to restructure banks (AP)

Saturday, December 31st, 2011

LONDON ? The British government will restructure the country’s banks by separating their retail activities from riskier investment banking operations, Business Secretary Vince Cable said Sunday.

Cable said the government will comply with the recommendations of an independent commission set up after the 2008 banking crisis and “proceed with the separation of the banks.”

“It’s absolutely right that we make the British economy safe,” Cable told the BBC. “We just cannot risk having a repetition of that financial catastrophe that we had three years ago.”

Treasury chief George Osborne is due to lay out the government’s plans in Parliament on Monday. Cable told the BBC that the necessary legislation would be passed before the government’s term ends in 2015.

The British government bought up large chunks of the country’s banking system after it ran into major financial difficulties during the 2008 credit crunch. The British taxpayer now fully owns mortgage lenders Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley, along with 83 percent of Royal Bank of Scotland and 41 percent of Lloyd’s Banking Group.

Northern Rock, however, is due to be sold to Richard Branson’s Virgin Money.

The Independent Commission on Banking recommended in September that the banks be restructured by 2019 to reduce the risks of taxpayers having to bear the cost of any future bailouts.

The commission, chaired by former Bank of England chief economist John Vickers, said retail banks should be “legally, economically and operationally separate” from the parent companies.

It also recommended that retail banks should be required to boost the amount of equity capital they hold.

The commission estimated its proposals would cost the banks up to 7 billion pounds ($11 billion) a year, and critics of the plan say it could slow lending at a time when the economy is in danger of sliding back into recession.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/britain/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111218/ap_on_bi_ge/eu_britain_banks

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EU in antitrust probe of Apple, e-book publishers (AP)

Wednesday, December 7th, 2011

BRUSSELS ? The European Union’s antitrust watchdog is probing whether Apple helped five major publishing houses illegally raise prices for e-books when it launched its iPad tablet and iBookstore in 2010.

The probe, announced Tuesday by the European Commission, offers a glimpse into the fierce fight for shares of the growing e-book market, especially as Apple has tried to take on Amazon and its Kindle e-book reader. It also highlights the struggle for profits between retailers and publishers, as more and more readers download books electronically.

In particular, the Commission is investigating a significant shift in the way the price of e-books is determined that occurred in 2010, just as Cupertino, California-based Apple introduced the iPad and its own online bookshop, iBookstore.

Apple was the first retailer that allowed publishers to move to so-called agency agreements, which let publishers set the price that online bookshops sell e-books to consumers. Until then, publishers were able to set the wholesale price of e-books, while retailers decided what price to sell them on to readers.

“The Commission has concerns that these practices may breach EU antitrust rules that prohibit cartels and restrictive business practices,” the regulator said in a statement.

Giving publishers the power to set retail prices could effectively restrict competition between online bookshops, since it takes away individual retailers’ powers to set lower prices. Since Apple’s deal with the publishers, several other online retailers have also shifted to the agency model, possibly in an attempt to secure the rights to sell popular e-books.

The EU investigation targets publishers Hachette Livre, a unit of France’s Lagardere Publishing; Harper Collins, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s U.S.-based News Corp.; CBS Corp.’s Simon & Schuster; Penguin, which is owned by U.K. publishing house Pearson Group; and Germany’s Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck, which owns Macmillan.

The Commission stressed the probe was in its early stages and did not mean the companies actually broke EU competition law. It follows a similar investigation by Britain’s Office of Fair Trading and a class action lawsuit against the same five publishers and Apple filed this summer in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

The U.K. agency on Tuesday closed its own probe, since the Commission has taken over the case, but said it was cooperating closely with the EU investigation. It said its investigation was triggered by several complaints, without naming any names.

Apple representative Bethan Lloyd said the company would decline to comment at this time.

Pearson said the fact that the Commission has opened a probe did not prejudge its outcome. “Pearson does not believe it has breached any laws, and will continue to fully and openly cooperate with the Commission,” it said.

Holtzbrinck echoed that statement, saying it found the Commission’s case “without reason.”

HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster said they are cooperating with the investigation, while Hachette Livre declined to comment.

The e-book market has been dominated by Amazon.com Inc. and its Kindle reader, with both Apple and Barnes & Noble’s Nook reader fighting to break in.

In a summary of its complaint, the U.S. law firm Hagens Berman, which filed the U.S. class-action suit, claims that “Apple believed that it needed to neutralize the Kindle when it entered the e-book market with its own e-reader, the iPad, and feared that one day the Kindle might challenge the iPad by digitally distributing other media like music and movies.”

The lawsuit also alleges that, following Apple’s deals, Amazon was forced to abandon its discount pricing model and move to the agency model.

___

Robert Barr in London, Hillel Italie in New York, Elaine Ganley in Paris, and Kirsten Grieshaber in Berlin contributed to this report.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/tech/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111206/ap_on_hi_te/eu_ebooks_antitrust_probe

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D.Boerse urges EU regulators to take wider futures view (Reuters)

Thursday, October 27th, 2011

BRUSSELS (Reuters) ? Deutsche Boerse AG sought to convince EU regulators to judge its bid for NYSE Euronext by assessing over-the-counter derivatives trading and not only its impact on the smaller exchange-listed market, in its bid to win clearance for the deal.

The European Commission is reviewing the $9 billion transaction only in terms of the exchange-listed market, sources have told Reuters. Securing EU regulatory approval is seen as the biggest hurdle for the operators, whose combination would create the world’s largest exchange operator.

The narrower market underlines the impact of the combination, which would have more than 90 percent of the trade in exchange-listed futures in Europe, and has put pressure on the operators to offer significant concessions to secure regulatory approval for the deal.

Andreas Preuss, chief executive of Deutsche Boerse’s Eurex derivatives unit, attended a closed-door hearing with regulators in Brussels on Thursday, urging them to take the broader view.

“Today, we have pointed out that the derivatives market is a global market dominated by OTC (over-the-counter) trading,” he said in a statement.

“OTC volumes are substantially bigger than exchange-traded volumes — OTC markets are a direct competitor to regulated markets that stand for transparency and effective risk management in derivatives trading,” he said.

Preuss said the combination of the operators’ Eurex and Liffe derivatives operations would increase transparency and risk management in derivatives trading.

Regulators by contrast have warned the exchange operators of the near-monopoly both in existing and future products from the combined group, in a statement of objections or charge sheet sent to them on October 5, according to a person who has seen the document.

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Regulators are also concerned that rival derivatives platforms may not be able to enter the market if they do not get access to the merged operator’s post-trade clearing facilities, the person said.

That document also outlined the Commission’s reasons for assessing the deal only in terms of exchanged-listed futures trade (ETD).

“The market investigation revealed that, depending on the category of customers, there is either no substitution between highly standardized ETD contracts or OTC contracts, or that such substitution may be limited to a small category of contract,” the source said, citing the document.

Regulators pointed to a “distinguishable group of customers that have no mandates to trade OTC derivatives and hence for whom OTC derivatives are not alternatives,” the person said.

NYSE Euronext Chief Executive Duncan Niederauer and Deutsche Boerse CEO Reto Francioni were also in Brussels for the hearing.

The Commission is scheduled to decide by December 22 whether to clear the deal.

Guillaume Loriot, the deputy head of EU Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia’s cabinet, and Eliana Garces Tolon, another cabinet member in charge of financial issues, led the Commission team at the hearing.

Other participants included Bernd Langeheine, deputy director general for mergers at the Commission, Nick Banasevic, who is handling the case and Commission lawyers.

Representatives from Germany, France, Britain, Spain, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy and Ireland were present at the hearing.

The London Stock Exchange and its Turquoise trading platform, Nasdaq, Euroclear, ICAP, Chi-X — the largest pan-European platform — Bank of New York Mellon and bank lobbying group the Association for Financial Markets in Europe also sent representatives to the hearing, which continues on Friday.

(Additional reporting by Edward Taylor in Frankfurt; Editing by Rex Merrifield and David Holmes)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/stocks/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111027/bs_nm/us_dboerse_nyse_eu

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OtterBox Tries To Get Chinese Phone Cases Banned

Sunday, June 5th, 2011

The U.S. International Trade Commission says that U.S. firms lost at least $48 billion in a single year thanks to Chinese companies stealing their intellectual property designs. U.S. smartphone case manufacturer, OtterBox, has had enough and doesn’t want to take it anymore.

OtterBox has built a $50 million business designing hard case covers for smartphones, e-readers and tablets and now it wants to stop the entire Chinese knock-off industry from stealing and selling its designs. The Fort Collins, Colo.-based company filed a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission last week that names a slew of Chinese manufacturers as the culprits. It also called on the carpet more than a few U.S. outlets that sell cases imported from China including companies in Georgia, New York, Tennessee, and one in its own small home town, TheCaseSpace of Fort Collins.

OtterBox is particularly wanting to stop the overseas cheap knock offs of its popular Defender Series and Commuter Series cases. The Defender series, for instance, features hard, colorful shells of silicon and plastic and costs about $50 for the smartphone cases ($90 for iPad case). In contrast, TheCaseSpace sells a similar-looking shell for the iPhone called The Vault Case priced at about $40.


Pink imposter? The OtterBox Defender (left) vs. the Vault (right).

To OtterBox, cases like the Vault should be declared contraband and stopped at the border like a bag of cocaine.

“OtterBox has requested the ITC to issue orders to generally exclude all infringing products from entry into the United States as well as prohibit advertising, distribution and sale of these products within the United States. Orders will be administered by U.S. Customs and Border Protection at all United States ports of entry,” the company said.

We aren’t hopeful that OtterBox will get its wish, as it seems the USITC is fond of five-year investigations — and business fortunes in the high-tech industry are won and loss and few times over in that time span. But the commission is starting to look more seriously at China. Its report, published about two weeks ago, was compiled from a survey of 5,000 U.S. firms conducted in 2009. In addition to putting a $48 billion price tag on the annual cost of losing business to China, it found that firms spent another $4.8 billion in 2009 to try and combat Chinese IP infringement. And these are conservative estimates because the 5,000 surveys were sent only to companies in industries heavily targeted by Chinese IP theft.

Perhaps the harshest statistic from the USITC report is that, if China’s knock-off culprits were stopped, 923,000 U.S. jobs would be created by the 5,000 companies surveyed alone.

Using statistical modeling, the commission then determined that if China were to implement intellectual property right protections on par with the U.S.’s, billions of dollars would be earned and millions of jobs would be created. The report concluded that such a change would result in, “(1) a $21.4 billion increase in U.S. exports of goods and services, (2) a $87.8 billion increase in sales to U.S. majority-owned affiliates in China, (3) a potential 2.1 million increase in net U.S. employment under conditions of prolonged and high unemployment.”

Source: http://hothardware.com/News/OtterBox-Tries-To-Get-Chinese-Phone-Cases-Banned/

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