Europe and the United Kingdom have not yet negotiated a financing agreement that would allow something like the pre-Brexit status quo.
Photographer: Hollie Adams / Bloomberg
Photographer: Hollie Adams / Bloomberg
The European Union is unlikely to give the United Kingdom equivalence in financial services, with divergences between the two “most likely scenarios” in the coming years, Advisor Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said. Jose Manuel Barroso.
“I personally believe that there will be no permanent equivalence decision on the part of the European Union in terms of financial services,” Barroso said at a Moody’s Investor Services webinar on Thursday. “It is more or less inevitable, irreversible, a trend of progressive divergence,” he said.
Barroso’s comments, which led the European Commission for a decade until 2014, underline the tough line the EU has taken so far in this regard. Europe and the United Kingdom have not yet negotiated a financing agreement that would allow something like the pre-Brexit status quo. Discussions to be concluded in March focus on a path of cooperation and are mainly of symbolic relevance, while any decision on equivalence is unlikely to come soon.
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“It is clear” the EU wants more business to move from London to the eurozone as a result of Brexit, Barroso added. The bloc wants “dislocation” of capital, people and “risk management from the UK to the eurozone and the European Union in general,” he said.