Skip to main content

NI negotiations in progress.

 Sir Tim Bar­row, the prime min­is­ter’s national secur­ity adviser and former ambas­sador to the EU, has been deployed to help with the dip­lomacy around the highly sens­it­ive dis­cus­sions.


Brexit

Simon Case, cab­inet sec­ret­ary, is said by col­leagues to be play­ing an increas­ingly import­ant role, draw­ing on his exper­i­ence of EU nego­ti­ations. The case led to early dis­cus­sions on the Irish bor­der prob­lem thrown up by Brexit.

Three people famil­iar with the talks said there had been a «sig­ni­fic­ant» step for­ward and that the out­line of a frame­work agree­ment was crys­tal­lising.

But two EU insiders cau­tioned that con­vert­ing the out­line of a deal into a viable polit­ical agree­ment «depended a lot» on whether Sunak could sell the deal in Lon­don.

Talks between Lon­don and Brus­sels have intens­i­fied in recent weeks to thrash out a deal to min­im­ise the impact of the North­ern Ire­land pro­tocol, which cre­ated a trade bor­der in the Irish Sea.

Sir Jef­frey Don­ald­son, the DUP leader, has repeatedly said any deal must «restore our place in the UK».

A deal will turn on whether the agree­ment can reduce checks at the Irish Sea trade bor­der to man­age­able levels and resolve the role of the European Court of Justice in enfor­cing the pro­tocol.

A sys­tem of «red» and «green» lanes is expec­ted to form the basis of a plan to reduce checks on goods going from Great Bri­tain to North­ern Ire­land, with products destined to remain in the region being clearly labelled.

www.sba.tax

Labels:

Comments

  1. Jerry28 January 2023 at 12:34

    They need to solve this right away so things can return to normal. A lot of businesses and people are suffering because of this specific issue. It needs solving very fast.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Karl28 January 2023 at 13:32

      I wonder why they don't just go to the way things were before Brexit, with a few changes that naturally need to be made. Why does it have to be so complicated? I'm sure I'm missing a lot of parts here, but I just want this solved already.

      Delete

Post a Comment

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...
4 comments
Read more

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...
2 comments
Read more

Google has launched its Bard chat­bot.

  Google has launched its Bard chat­bot in a move to rival OpenAI’s pop­u­lar Chat­GPT, as it seeks to make up lost ground in the race to com­mer­cial­ise gen­er­at­ive arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence tech­no­logy. Google said that Bard, which provides answers to text­based ques­tions, will be run sep­ar­ately from its Google Search engine. In recent weeks, gen­er­at­ive AI has also been integ­rated into widely used pro­ductiv­ity applic­a­tions, such as Google’s Work­space includ­ing Google Docs and Gmail, and Microsoft’s Office 365 soft­ware, as well as into pop­u­lar apps such as Duolingo, allow­ing mil­lions of people to start inter­act­ing with the tech­no­logy. «We want to get feed­back and gradu­ally phase up the num­ber of people who have access to Bard, and the reason for that is we want to be able to test and learn from that before we roll it out very widely,» said Zoubin Ghahramani, vice-pres­id­ent of Google Research. Bard is built on top of Google’s AI tech­no­logy known a...
3 comments
Read more