Though most member states have proposed generous allocations for their companies, so as to lighten the obligations for local industry in cutting carbon emissions, the EU will clamp down on countries that over-allocate permits.

"If it appears there are over-allocations, we will adjust to the right numbers," Stavros Dimas, the EU's environment commissioner, told the newspaper.

He said that governments would not be allowed to award more permits for the second phase than the first, which has been running since January 2005.

An unnamed senior European Commission official also told the newspaper: "All of the plans have some small things wrong with them."

The newspaper also reported that Gunter Verheugen, the EU industry commissioner, has warned Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso against moving the EU faster on climate change than the rest of the world.

In a letter to the Commission's president, Verheugen argued that "our environmental leadership" could undermine the competitiveness of industries that were energy-intensive.

The EU's carbon trading scheme has increasingly become the focus of international attention, as a British government-commissioned report late last month said that such schemes should be expanded in an effort to avert global warming.

The report, written by former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern, said that countries around the world risked losing a fifth of their gross domestic product over a lack of action on climate change.

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