EU’s Barnier Warns U.K. to Focus on Exit or Risk No Brexit Deal

The European Union’s chief Brexit negotiator said the U.K. must settle the details of its divorce from the EU before discussing any future free-trade deal or risk crashing out without an accord, in a rebuff to Prime Minister Theresa May.
“The U.K. government will push for parallel negotiations on the withdrawal and the future relationship,” Michel Barnier told the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France. “This is a very risky approach. To succeed, we need on the contrary to devote the first phase of negotiations exclusively to reaching an agreement on the principles of the exit.”
With a consultative role in the negotiations that are due to get underway next month and veto power over the final agreement, the EU Parliament is scheduled at around noon on Wednesday to outline its priorities for the two-year process that May triggered last week. The stance will be the assembly’s input into negotiating guidelines that the leaders of Britain’s
27 EU partners are due to fix on April 29.
Barnier said that the first phase of negotiations on exiting the bloc “is our best chance to build trust” before moving on to the future relations. “We are not proposing this to be tactical or to create difficulties for the U.K.,” he told EU lawmakers. “On the contrary, it is an essential condition to maximze our chances to reach an agreement within two years.”
The 751-seat Parliament plans to warn the U.K. against starting free-trade negotiations with countries outside the EU before Brexit, saying such a step would violate the bloc’s law, and to call on Britain to “honor all its legal, financial and budgetary obligations,” according to a draft resolution sponsored by five of the six main political groups. Juncker has put the divorce bill for Britain at as much as 60 billion euros
($64 billion).
“If you leave the house, you have to pay the bills,” said Gianni Pittella, Italian leader of the Socialists in the EU Parliament. “It’s simply doing your duty.”
Any separate accord on the U.K.’s future relationship with the EU should exclude “piecemeal or sectoral provisions, including with respect to financial services,” that would give Britain-based businesses preferential access to the EU internal market, according to the assembly’s draft resolution.

Source: Bloomberg

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