o Securing the right talent is one of the biggest challenges faced by Chief Finance Officers
          o Finance Business Partnering is the way ahead to gain competitive advantage

      The training, development and retention of the finance function is crucial to the success of an organisation, especially in the current economic climate, asserts a new report from ACCA (the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants) and KPMG called Maximising People Power: Effective talent management in finance.

Europol’s supervisory body has just published a report on the implementation of the EU-US TFTP agreement (Terrorism Finance Tracking Programme), the so-called SWIFT agreement. The conclusions by the Joint Supervisory Board (overseeing data protection issues) of Europol raise serious concerns about compliance with EU data protection standards as Europol appears to be just rubberstamping requests for the transfer of bulk data, without any kind of scrutiny or oversight.

5 March 2011, Athens

The leaders of the Party of European Socialists (PES) this morning adopted a text; 'Europe is in the wrong hands', which sets out a clear alternative to the 'austerity only' agenda.

The European Commission today announced the launch of the first ever European Equal Pay Day, to take place on 5 March. The Greens support the initiative but have called on the Commission to do much more. MEPs are organising a cross-political action in the EP to use the new European Parliament right of initiative to this end, with a press launch on Women's Day next week (Tuesday, 8 March)*. Responding to the Commission announcement, Green MEP and member of the EP women's rights committee Franziska Brantner said: