EU issues warning to Italy, others over energy market

ROME, April 4 (Xinhua) -- The European Commission (EC) has sent Italy and 16 other European Union members a formal complaint over their failure to open up their respective energy markets, Italian News Agency ANSA reported Tuesday.

Italy and seven other member countries also received a separate warning from the EC over their failure to incorporate EU regulations on developing renewable electricity sources.

The deadline to incorporate EU regulations into national laws expired in October 2003.

The notifications were the first step towards filing a formal lawsuit, ANSA said.

In a separate action, the EC opened official proceedings against France for its recent law which regulates cross-border mergers and acquisitions.

The French law was used this year by Paris to block the bid by Italy's electricity company Enel for the Franco-Belgian utility Suez and encourage an all-French merger between Suez and Gaz du France (GdF).

French President Jacques Chirac last week defended the GdF-Suez merger by saying that Enel's bid was "purely financial and made no economic sense. Enel's intentions were in contrast with those of ( Suez) shareholders and the nations of France and Belgium".

According to the French president, the merger of GdF and Suez was not an improvised move to block Enel because "negotiations for this have been in progress for six months".

Aside from Italy, the 16 countries cited by the EC for failure to open their energy markets were: Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Germany, Estonia, Spain, Finland, France, Greece, Ireland, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Sweden, Slovakia and Britain.

The seven member states, aside from Italy which the EC said had failed to develop alternative, renewable electricity sources were: Britain, Poland, Czech Republic, Latvia, Cyprus, Greece and Ireland.