The Spanish EU Presidency yesterday decided to shelve a vote on the proposed AIFM Directive on hedge funds and private equity due to “a last-minute intervention by Gordon Brown”, according to the FT. The talks apparently stalled on British concerns ove…

A BBC documentary has revealed that Londoners will not benefit from a “pre-sale” of tickets for the Olympic games thanks to EU competition law, which prevents discrimination in favour of the host country. Despite having swallowed the increases on their…

A leader in this week’s Economist looks at one of the areas where the EU is rarely criticised: its competition policy.EU Competition policy can broadly be divided into two main areas.The first area deals with state aid - it is the job of the EU to prev…

Open Europe has a short article in this month’s edition of Parliament Magazine, detailing how the Spanish EU Presidency could contribute to getting Europe’s economy back on track. We argue:Instead of trying to make economic underperformance illegal an…

Open Europe has today published a list of the top 100 most costly EU regulations, detailing the annual cost of the laws, the cumulative cost of them by 2020, and the article base in the Lisbon Treaty for each regulation . We estimate that these laws wi…

In a speech yesterday David Cameron cited Open Europe’s recent report which showed that the UK has spent more than £35 billion complying with EU employment, health and safety law in the last decade.What he didn’t mention, is the report’s even more imp…

We’ve just come across another hugely significant ruling by the European Court of Justice on the EU’s Working Time Directive (WTD), which slipped largely under the radar last week. HR magazine People Management has the story.Essentially, in the latest …

In case you missed it, Open Europe last week organised a debate on the EU’s proposed new rules for hedge funds, private equity firms, and various other funds currently not regulated by EU law. In good-old Brussels fashion the proposal goes under the ac…