Greece gets EU budget approval

BRUSSELS — After eight years of toil by the Greek people, the European Union says Greece is no longer breaking budget rules.

Wednesday’s recommendation from the EU Commission to end the so-called “excessive deficit procedure” on Greece comes after a sharp improvement in the country’s finances following years of spending cuts and tax increases and a recession that wiped out a quarter of the economy and caused unemployment and poverty to swell.

“This is a very symbolic moment for Greece,” said Pierre Moscovici, the EU’s top economy official. “It’s the end of austerity, and the end of austerity means also we need to move to a strategy that’s based on growth, job creation and social fairness.”

Greece has been under the spotlight since 2009 when its debt crisis exploded in the wake of a statistics scandal that showed the public finances were in far worse shape than thought.

Mexico’s billion-barrel find

Mexico’s decision to allow private companies to explore for oil and gas started to pay off after the discovery of at least a billion barrels in a new offshore field.

A consortium of Premier Oil Plc, Sierra Oil & Gas S de RL de CV and Talos Energy LLC made the discovery in the shallow waters of the southern Gulf of Mexico just two years after winning the exploration license. It’s the first new find by a private company in the country in almost 80 years, according to consultant Wood Mackenzie, possible only after the government ended the monopoly of state-run Petroleos Mexicanos.

The Zama discovery “is the most important achievement so far of Mexico’s energy reform,” Pablo Medina, the senior upstream analyst for Latin America at Wood Mackenzie, said by email. “It is one of the 15 largest shallow-water fields discovered globally in the past 20 years.”

Google wins tax case

Google emerged as the victor in its latest legal battle in Europe on Wednesday, after a French court said the technology behemoth did not have to pay $1.3 billion in back taxes.

At issue was whether Google avoided taxes in France by routing sales in the country through an Irish-based subsidiary over a five-year period ending in 2010. But an administrative court in Paris ruled that the Irish subsidiary was not taxable in France.

Balkans important for EU

TRIESTE, Italy — Italy warned Wednesday that the European Union must keep its doors open to eventual membership for Western Balkan countries or risk allowing Russia and other global powers to increase their influence in the region.

The European Union is keen to show it’s still committed to the Balkans although the official enlargement process is on hold until 2019, and the bloc itself is fraught with its own problems — Brexit and tamping down migration leading the list.

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