Brussels / Geneva, 13/09/2001 (Agence Europe) - The World Trade Organisation (WTO) has set up three new panels to rule on the legality of the Countervailing Measures the United States has imposed on former European public steel producers. The Union lies at the origin of this intervention that it had requested in august. This request, which at the time ran up against the opposition of the American delegation, was renewed at the beginning of the week and automatically accepted by the multilateral dispute settlement body.
The measures being disputed sanction a series of steel companies, previously public, for subsidies said to have been granted to them before their privatisation. The European Commission has on several occasions asked Washington, notably in the context of bilateral consultations that have been going on these past few months under the auspices of the WTO, to dismantle them, invoking the verdict that the international arbitrator had passed down in the case of "British Steel". It maintains that this verdict, essentially against the Americans, had created a "clear" precedent for all the other cases implicating privatised steel companies by denouncing, among other things, the methodology on which the American anti-subsidy procedure continues to be broadly based and establishing that the privatisation of a pubic company at a fair market price eliminates the benefit of earlier subsidies.
One of the three disputes for which the WTO is now called upon to decide concerns 12 cases of countervailing measures affecting steel products imported from several Member States (including Italy, France, Denmark, the UK and Spain). Another aims the re-examination undertaken in America in view of determining whether certain of these duties should be maintained beyond their deadline: here, the Union claims that the measures imposed on the importers of flat stainless products from Germany were maintained despite the minimum level of subsidies observed and without any proof having been produced to demonstrate the probability of seeing them upwardly reviewed. The third case concerns American safeguard measures against the import of steel tubes and pipes which, according to the Europeans, are incompatible with the Multilateral Agreement in the matter and with GATT.