ABSTRACT
However, politics is at best a strange animal, and there are always those who criticise free zones and freeports within the parliamentary environment. The socialists in the UK have long argued that free-ports are a means of the duty exemption, which is completely false, as there is no such thing as duty exemption. EU state aid rules provide the ample scope for the member states to support the economic development of outermost regions, such as Madeira, and to address the structural challenges of the companies active in such regions. As part of its standard monitoring of the implementation of state aid decisions, the commission carried out a preliminary assessment of how portugal applied the ZFM aid scheme until its expiry at the end of 2014, taking into account the framework of the 2007 and 2013 commission decisions approving the scheme.
