Northern Ireland -EU Trade talks

Brussels and London have taken a step back after a week of confrontation over the post-Brexit Northern Ireland trading arrangements, agreeing to refocus talks on areas where there is a prospect of reaching agreement.

Maros Sefcovic, the EU’s Brexit negotiator, said while the UK still needed to engage more fully in resolving issues raised by the so-called Northern Ireland protocol, the mood had improved.

Lord David Frost, the UK Brexit minister who is demanding a root-and-branch rewriting of the protocol, said talks had been conducted in a “constructive spirit” but it was now important “to bring new energy and impetus” to the discussions, including tackling the full list of UK demands.

The protocol, which formed part of the EU-UK Brexit withdrawal agreement, leaves Northern Ireland in the EU single market for goods.

It requires a customs border in the Irish Sea in order to prevent the return of a north-south trade border on the island of Ireland.

Since July, the British government has said this arrangement was “not sustainable” because of trade frictions it created within the UK’s own internal market.

Sefcovic said discussion of Article 16 had come up “too often” between the two sides and urged the UK to focus on the EU’s practical proposals that he said would reduce Irish Sea border customs checks by up to 50 per cent.

In a statement released after the talks, Lord Frost said that while the UK preferred a “consensual way forward”, it still reserved its right to use the Article 16 safeguards, which were “a legitimate part of the protocol’s provisions”, but two senior Whitehall insiders with knowledge of internal discussions said the UK shift in tone was “significant” and that it was now possible that any decision to trigger Article 16 could be deferred until after Christmas.

The difference between the two sides centres on the UK’s demand that the EU’s top court, the European Court of Justice, should not preside over the deal, with its role being replaced by a ‘treaty based’ arbitration mechanism.

Comments

Cloud Bookkeeping

HS2 cost cuts new routes and add delays.

Transport department officials have begun work on «Project Silverlight» suggesting the highspeed rail scheme might face four additional years of delay. The planned High Speed 2 rail line faces further delays of up to four years and more cuts to the project under plans being drawn up by ministers to rein in its ballooning costs. The extra delays to the country’s biggest infrastructure project would mean that it would not be completed until as late as 2045 — 12 years after originally planned. «This is a function of inflation; we are having to find huge savings because the cost of everything the department is already doing will have become so much more expensive by then,» said one government official. In October, the FT reported that the Treasury had asked HS2’s management team to identify potential cuts or «scope reductions» to the high-speed line. Transport department officials have subsequently begun work on Project Silverlight aimed at fi...

Small business will be excluded from fraud law.

Ministers are planning to exclude small businesses from anti-fraud legislation by narrowing the scope of a criminal offence targeting companies that fail to prevent economic crimes. MPs and anti-corruption campaigners had hoped the government would seek to amend the economic crime and corporate transparency bill to ensure the new offence covered all companies. The plans to limit the scope of the amendments will also disappoint those who had hoped the legislation would remove key hurdles to the prosecution of white-collar crime. A new «failure to prevent» offence for fraud would bring it in line with existing similar corporate offences for bribery and tax evasion. At present, prosecutors need only prove that organisations lacked «reasonable» or «adequate» controls to pursue the offence in bribery and tax evasion cases. «It would be much more sensible for the government to provide strong guidance for SMEs on what these proce...

Doubt on CS's collateral.

Credit Suisse provided an emergency $140mn loan to Greensill Capital based partly on invoices to companies that deny ever doing the business stated on the documents. The Swiss bank provided the loan in October 2020, less than five months before the collapse of Greensill, a supply chain finance firm that counted former British prime minister David Cameron as a senior adviser. Invoices issued by metals magnate Sanjeev Gupta’s Liberty Commodities and sold to Greensill formed part of the collateral for the loan, according to documents seen by the Financial Times and people familiar with the transaction. Yet several of the parties named on the invoices have told the FT they did no business with Liberty. GFG has consistently denied any wrongdoing. Credit Suisse’s loan had a clause dictating that the collateral value had to be equal to or greater than the $140mn borrowed. The terms of the debt agreement only allowed invoices on Green-sill’s balance sheet to count towards this tally if t...

Search This Blog