FOOTBALL

Football hooligans beware! Frattini Force is coming

With an eye to stop violence and arson being part of every game around Europe, Franco Frattini, the European Commissioner for justice, proposed launching a pilot police training project next year. Addressing journalists at a joint press conference with Michel Platini, president of European football’s governing body UEFA and Rui Pereira, Portuguese Interior Minister Frattini outlined his vision of a European force which should be in place before the 2008 tournament. Frattini said, “We want to build specialised European units ready to intervene in case of need on the occasion of international sporting events. This is a step forward towards the creation, one day, of a true European police (force) for sport.”Answering a question, the commissioner stressed joint initiatives would focus on improving training and cooperation rather than wearing the same uniform. “I prefer to talk about responsibility and cooperation rather than uniforms,” he said. The idea is a brain child of Platini as he told journalists, saying Frattini “jumped on this idea and I thank him for making it happen.”When asked if the behaviour of the players, coaches and managers had any impact on the behaviour of the fans, Platini said that, as violence was society’s problem and football was at the centre of people’s social lives, it was natural that perpetrators of violence would try to take over the game. “We must therefore act to protect sport and give judges the means to enforce the law,” he said.Frattini told journalists, “Although we need concrete assessing, we have funds something like 10 million Euro to start with under Europol but will depend on how much and when.”Frattini’s proposals got immediate support from the European Parliament as Manolis Mavrommatis, vice chairman of the parliamentary committee on education and culture, told New Europe, “The proposal of the Commissioner and Vice President of the European Commission Mr Franco Frattini to finance the efforts against violence inside sport fields is a very good start for European Union’s countries. This proposal shows real interest, sensibility and at the same time determination to fight hooliganism inside and outside the sport fields.However, problems related to violence and its tackling, have their pre-eminent place on the ‘White Paper on Sport’ report, and it is absolutely sure that the majority of the Members of the European Parliament will support and approve the related provisions in the Plenary Session in Strasbourg, next April.”Mavrommatis added, “Violence on and off the fields could be tackled with a more qualitative football, with good arbitration, with the help of the media, with the effective cooperation between the state and the sport clubs, with the presentation of TV shows and spots on the results of violence and finally with the education that schools provide

Russia-bypass pipelines: More hope than gas?


Ever since the beginning of 2006, when that whole episode between Russia and Ukraine led to gas shortages in Europe, bringing the issue of energy security to the forefront, the European Union has been trying to find new sources of gas in order to reduce its reliance on Russia and to promote new routes to lessen its vulnerability to the pipelines transiting Ukraine and Belarus. But, in fact, analysts say, Europe has only made progress on the question of pipelines.
Turkey and Greece opened a 285-kilometre pipeline on November 18 from Karacabey to Komotini, creating an energy corridor that connects the Caspian gas fields to Europe. The new pipeline, which will eventually have a 12 billion cubic metre per year capacity, is intended to serve as the first part of a Turkey-Greece-Italy Interconnector.
"They (the EU) have been pushing this Interconnector pipeline and they have been pushing the Nabucco pipeline but, while these projects are moving ahead, there is a great deal of hope there will be gas to fill these pipelines once they are completed, but right now the evidence is there won’t be enough gas from Azerbaijan or even from Central Asia to fill them," Chris Weafer, the chief strategist with UralSib Bank in Moscow, told New Europe.
Azerbaijan has already stretched itself thin in terms of promising gas supplies to Turkey and Georgia, he said.
An Azeri official said Azerbaijan is ready to sell gas to Europe. "If we don’t have enough gas why the companies and the Azerbaijani government have invested a lot of money to build such pipelines like Baku-Tbilisi-Erzerum? In the oil industry there are no philanthropists. Everybody counts his money. Without profit nobody will do it. Such kind of talks is just speculation to say that... Azerbaijan cannot supply gas to Europe," he told New Europe.
Greece will buy part of the gas supplied from Phase I of Azerbaijan’s Shah Deniz field from Turkey. But once production from Phase II kicks in, there will be enough gas to supply not only Greece and Turkey, but other European countries, the official said.
Moreover, BP said it made a new discovery two weeks ago while drilling in Phase II of the Shah Deniz field. "We drew a well, appraised the existing reservoir we knew about and confirmed the size which will support the second phase of development of Shah Deniz. But while we were drilling that well, we decided to drill considerably deeper than the existing structures ... where we found an underlying structure and that’s the new discovery," BP spokesman David Nicholas told New Europe. "We’re talking many years away from potentially developing this new discovery. The second phase in the existing structure Shah Deniz is scheduled for supply in 2013. Any development in this deeper structure would be subsequent to that, so we are talking many years away," he said.
The Turkmen president has also been very active in trying to do energy deals and also, like the Azerbaijanis, promising a lot of gas to different partners. "There is a big question mark whether or not there is enough gas to fulfil those promises. In May they signed a deal with Russia to increase the capacity of a pipeline going north, but at the same time they signed a deal with Beijing to increase exports to China over the next few years and now they are talking actively with the EU about supplying gas to the Nabucco pipeline," Weafer said.
The question is how they are going to get it across the Caspian to Azerbaijan or the Black Sea, because they cannot build a pipeline across the Caspian as long as there is no agreement on the status of the Caspian Sea. They will either have to build this pipeline through Russia or not at all, as the alternative is through Iran and that can’t happen as long as Iran is subject to sanctions. There is also plenty of gas in Iran for Europe. The European Commission hopes the political problems would be resolved as quickly as possible in order to consider Iranian gas for Nabucco.
Meanwhile, US Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, on hand for the inauguration ceremonies for the Turkey-Greece Interconnector, tried to discourage any plans to fill it from Russia’s Blue Stream pipeline, especially once the Interconnector is extended to Italy. But as UralSib’s Weafer pointedly said, "Of course the Americans don’t like that, but frankly they are the problem. They are the ones who are blocking a resolution with Iran."