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Brexit and the rise of populist parties in national elections were signs the EU is no longer the power force it once was, Mr Dodik said.

He was speaking after it emerged a potentially explosive independence referendum will not be held in Bosnias Serb Republic next year.

He described Bosnia as a failing state on a path to further fragmentation, slammed the EU and praised Russia and China for offering the Balkans friendship without attaching political conditions.

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The very fact Britain is going out, that any elections are observed traumatically, it tells a lot about the whole story of the situation of the EU

Milorad Dodik

He told politico.eu: The European Union is fading away.

The very fact Britain is going out, that any elections are observed traumatically, it tells a lot about the whole story of the situation of the EU.

And it shows the EU image now is not the same as it was 10 years ago.

Chinas influence is much, much stronger and they are offering economic solutions without political interference.

Mr Dodik denied claims he was being manipulated by Russia to stoke tensions in the Balkans and said he had never discussed breaking his Serb Republic away from Bosnia with Vladimir Putin.

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But he said he would rather deal with the Russian leader than the EU and past US administrations.

He said: Russia havent asked anything from me, to do anything impossible.

But when I go to Brussels, when I went to Washington previously, pressure was put on me and on many other politicians from here as well. So whats natural?

Is it natural that you go somewhere where you are welcome, or to go somewhere where the pressure is put on you?

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There are growing fears of new conflict in Bosnia and across the Balkans as ethnic groups attempt to redraw national borders.

Western officials warned Serb Republic leaders that breaking away would be illegal and not recognised by the international community.

The Serb Republic is one of Bosnias two autonomous regions, known as entities, established under the Dayton peace agreement that ended the 1992-1995 Bosnian war which killed 100,000 people.

Read more from the original source:
'EU is fading away' Bosnian Serb leader uses Brexit to pour scorn on Brussels bigwigs - Express.co.uk

The fine -- announced Tuesday -- is a record, but it's not unique. Other U.S. companies have faced similar penalties. Intel (INTC, Tech30) was fined 1.06 billion ($1.2 billion) in an antitrust case in 2009. It is still fighting the decision.

Before that, Microsoft (MSFT, Tech30) was slapped with several antitrust fines that added up to well over $1.8 billion.

These fines make people wonder whether the EU has something against American companies.

But EU rules are clear. The European Commission can levy fines of up to 10% of a company's global annual turnover in antitrust cases. Google's (GOOGL, Tech30) global revenue last year was almost $90 billion, which means the maximum fine could have been $9 billion.

"The same guidelines would apply if it was a U.K., French or any other [EU] member state's company being fined," said Adam Rooney, a partner at Signature Litigation, a firm focusing on commercial cross-border disputes.

European companies get hit too

Fines against European companies tend to be smaller, because their revenues also tend to be smaller.

But there have been cases of the EU imposing big fines on big European businesses. Germany's Daimler (DMLRY), which makes Mercedes cars, was fined 1 billion in a cartel case last July.

Related: EU slaps Google with record $2.7 billion fine

But it's not just the size of the penalty that bothers some in the U.S.

"We have grave concerns about this fine which appears, once again, to justify our long held concerns about EU antitrust overreach adversely affecting U.S. companies," said Gary Shapiro, the president of the Consumer Technology Association, the tech sector's industry body.

The EU's top antitrust official, Margrethe Vestager, on Tuesday rejected suggestions she or the Commission were biased against U.S. companies.

She said that an analysis of investigations her department has launched found that U.S. companies were not being disproportionately targeted.

Vestager also pointed out many of the companies that complained against Google were based in the U.S.

Google 'undermines competition'

Indeed, some of Google's American rivals praised the Commission's decision.

News Corp (NWS), one of the companies that complained about Google's practices, said it "applauds the European Commission's leadership in confronting the discriminatory behavior of Google."

News Corp, Yelp (YELP), Getty Images, Oracle (ORCL, Tech30) and several other companies wrote to Vestager on Monday to express their support for her investigation into Google.

"As U.S. based companies, we wish to go on record that enforcement action against Google is necessary and appropriate, not provincial. We have watched Google undermine competition in the United States and abroad," the companies said in the letter.

Related: Related: EU hits Apple with $14.6 billion tax bill

Experts say it all comes down to different regulations and culture in the U.S. and EU.

Case in point: The Federal Trade Commission was also investigating the way Google favors its own services, but it never took formal steps to bring a case against the company.

"The big difference is cultural," said Angus MacCulloch, a lecturer in EU law at Lancaster University.

"The European view of the marketplace is more suspicious of 'market power' held by large corporations, be they European or U.S.-based. The EU Commission is therefore more likely to intervene in the market to protect consumers; especially when compared to the US enforcers," he said.

CNNMoney (London) First published June 27, 2017: 2:26 PM ET

See the original post here:
European Union: We're not biased against American companies - CNNMoney

BRUSSELS The European Union formally extended its economic sanctions on Russia on Wednesday, a widely expected step that keeps restrictions on business with Russian energy, defense and financial sectors until Jan. 31, 2018.

The sanctions were imposed in July 2014 following Russia's annexation of Ukraine's Black Sea peninsula and Moscow's direct support for separatists in eastern Ukraine. Moscow denies direct involvement in the conflict despite NATO's assertions its troops are supporting the rebels.

EU leaders agreed to the extension at their summit in Brussels last week, after France and Germany cited no progress in efforts to negotiate an end to the conflict in eastern Ukraine that has killed more than 10,000 people since April 2014.

Under the sanctions that were imposed in tandem with the United States, European companies are banned from doing business with or investing in Russia's defense and energy industries, while financial ties are severely limited.

European companies cannot borrow or lend money to Russia's five main state-owned banks for more than 30 days, limiting Moscow's avenues for raising funds. Along with restrictions on business with Russia's top energy companies, exports of some energy-related equipment and technology to Russia must also be approved by EU governments.

Any lifting of sanctions on Russia is tied to the implementation of the Minsk peace deal for Ukraine which was negotiated by the leaders of France, Germany, Ukraine and Russia in 2015.

(Reporting by Robin Emmott; Editing by Mark Potter)

SYDNEY/VATICAN CITY Cardinal George Pell, a top adviser to Pope Francis, said on Thursday he was innocent of charges of sexual abuse in his native Australia, and that the pontiff had given him leave of absence to return there to defend himself.

WARSAW A trip to Poland by U.S. President Donald Trump next week may feel like a diplomatic coup for the right-wing government, but western European nations are uneasy it will encourage Warsaw's defiance towards Brussels.

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European Union extends Russia sanctions until Jan 2018 - Reuters

BRUSSELS: The European Union faces a 20-billion-euro hole in its annual budget due to Britains withdrawal and rising costs in issues such as defence, a commissioner said on Wednesday.

EU Budget Commissioner Guenther Oettinger, of Germany, called on the bloc to improve the efficiency of its spending in the wake of Brexit in March 2019. We wont have the UK with us any more, but they were net payers despite the Thatcher rebate, so we will have a gap of 10 to 11 billion euros a year, Oettinger told a press conference as he unveiled the commissions proposals for the budget.

Under late British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, Britain secured an annual rebate on its budget contribution worth more than three billion euros. Oettinger wrote separately in a blog on the proposals that at the same time we need to finance new tasks such as defence, internal security... The total gap could therefore be up to twice as much.

Twenty billion euros would amount to $22.5-billion. The EUs budget in 2017 was 157.9 billion euros.

The German commissioner said that the EU could, after Britain leaves, save money by eliminating all rebates enjoyed by a number of other countries. But it would have to take further measures, he said.

I am ambitious and realistic, he said. The Brexit gap will be financed by a mix of cuts, shifting expenditure, saving, and some new sources of money.

The commissions proposals suggest in particular that EU countries could save a lot of money by cooperating in key areas, as they aim to do on defence post-Brexit.

Read more here:
Brexit to blow 20-B hole in European Union budget: Commissioner - Economic Times

Back in 1980, Milton Friedman, the University of Chicago economist, starred in a public-television series called Free to Choose, in which he presented his free-market ideas and, famously, told a young man that everything he knew about monopoly power was wrong. In the United States, monopoly was synonymous with evil, an idea going back to Teddy Roosevelt and the original trustbusters, who saw oil cartels and rail syndicates as enemies run by sneering men with bulbous noses. But Friedmans surprising assertion was that monopolies were not the result of greedy people amassing and abusing power but, rather, of stupid government rules. I believe if you examine the sources of monopoly you will find that almost all those sources are government intervention, Friedman argued. The cure for monopoly, he said, was reducing rules and restrictions, which would inspire market competition and prevent a single company from exclusively holding any corner of commerce.

American antitrust law has followed philosophies ranging from trustbuster to the Chicago School. But both sides of this dispute have something in common: they see monopoly power as dangerous because it limits competition and raises prices, hurting consumers. This emphasis on prices is central to the American antitrust world view. Depending on the ideological leanings of the particular Presidential Administration, the goal keeping prices down has been pursued by increasing government (the Roosevelt school of thought) or by reducing it (as in Friedman's message).

Price is the key word in American antitrust lawhigher prices are bad, and lower prices are good. For the European Union, which wrote its own antitrust laws decades later, after the rise of the Internet, the key word is innovation. Monopoly for the Europeans can raise prices, lower prices, or have no impact on prices but still be dangerous because it stifles new ideas. The European Commission has taken a forceful global role in establishing that view, especially under Margrethe Vestager, the current commissioner of competition, who, this week, levied a record $2.7 billion fine against Google for abusing its monopoly power.

The commission said that Google unfairly preferred its own services to those of competitors. When people searched for local restaurants, mechanics, or other services, the search engine placed its own Google-branded ratings far above those of competitors such as TripAdvisor and Yelp. In other cases, Google would put, on its own pages, quotes from places like TripAdvisor and Yelp, decreasing the motivation of searchers to go visit those other sites and depriving them of audience and advertising revenue. Google was, essentially, absorbing their entire business model into itself, and taking all of the ad money that went along with it. The company was doing this, in the opinion of the European Union, by abusing its power as the dominant search engine. (Google is even more dominant in Europe than it is in America, if such a thing is imaginable.) Google, of course, rejected these claims, and is considering an appeal.

What is perhaps most striking about the European Unions decision is that the complaints were all from big, U.S.-based firms: not only TripAdvisor and Yelp but also Microsoft, Oracle, and others. They had pursued Google through the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, to no avail. (Government antitrust lawyers found evidence that Google harmed competitors and consumers but chose not to prosecute.) Under the American antitrust model, a monopoly is a company that clearly controls something of value and uses that power, ultimately, to raise prices, thus hurting competition and consumers.

Googles case shows that the antitrust battle is much more confusing in a digital world. How am I harmed when one service that charges me nothing offers me ratings written (for free) by other users, but doesnt show me the ratings provided by an entirely different free service? It would be hard to explain to Teddy Roosevelt that someone receiving something for free is being harmed because of a lack of other (free) options. It should be better to have multiple sources of reviews and multiple ways of assessing businesses; it should be better for advertisers to have different companies selling ads. But how do we define better in these cases? Google is not the sort of obvious enemy that Teddy Roosevelt could point at with his sword and run up a hill to attack. Nor is there a government switch that can be turned off to create a Friedman-esque release from monopoly power.

The European Union defines antitrust more broadly than U.S. law does, and thus has more subtle lines of attack. It prohibits firms that hold a dominant position on a given market to abuse that position, for example by charging unfair prices, by limiting production, or by refusing to innovate to the prejudice of consumers. The phrase for example is doing a lot of work. It is an acknowledgement that government rules and business practices evolve, side by side. Define antitrust as raising prices, and businesses will find a way to abuse monopoly power by lowering prices. Regulators in Europe have discretion to evolve alongside the marketplace. Arguably, their discretion is too vast. It has been hard for anybodygovernment or private sectorto properly predict how future innovation will happen, and how best to support it. However, innovation (and, one might add, data) is clearly as important (if not more important) in this coming century as price. The E.U. laws are, surely, not perfect. But they are closer to the twenty-first century than U.S. laws written at a time of fairly clear oil and railroad monopolies. American law has been stuck in the old continuum between Roosevelt and Friedman. Neither of them is a good guide to this new terrain.

The rest is here:
Teddy Roosevelt Wouldn't Understand the EU's Antitrust Fine Against Google - The New Yorker