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13 December 2017

Financial Times: Italy’s Paolo Gentiloni calls for ‘tailor-made’ UK-EU trade deal


Italy has called on the EU to offer a “tailor-made” Brexit trade deal to the UK, in an accommodating move towards London, even as the bloc toughens its stance on trade and transition talks.

“We need a tailor-made model for the relationship between the UK and the EU but the first move, in my opinion, has to come from the UK because the level of ambition needs to come from the side asking to leave,” Paolo Gentiloni, the Italian prime minister, said in an interview in Rome on the first anniversary of his arrival at Palazzo Chigi, the seat of the Italian government.

Brussels argues that the UK faces a choice between remaining within the bloc’s single market, like Norway, or pursuing a more goods-oriented trade agreement, as the EU has concluded with Canada.

“There can be models of reference based on deals the EU has with third countries but these were all done . . . building off a white sheet, tabula rasa . . . Here we are doing the opposite — removing things from a 40 year-old structure of extraordinary relationships — and this operation is objectively unprecedented and complicated,” the Italian prime minister added. [...]

Full article on Financial Times (subscription required)



© Financial Times


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