City of London must face Brexit hit, Barnier tells finance chiefs
British trade negotiators will fail in their efforts to insulate the City of London from the worst consequences of Brexit, Michel Barnier warned a meeting of finance chiefs on Tuesday. The EU’s chief negotiator said that British demands in the ongoing trade talks in Brussels were unacceptable and that UK plans to ditch EU financial regulation risked another crisis that could hurt the bloc. UK proposals would make it easy to continue to run EU businesses from London after the end of the transition period on December 31, he said, and prevent the EU from freezing UK financial services out of the Single Market at short notice. "I will be blunt. Its proposals are unacceptable,” he said as negotiations continued in the Belgian capital, “The UK is trying to keep as many Single Market benefits as it can.” London remains Europe’s pre-eminent financial hub but that status is coveted by Paris, Amsterdam and Frankfurt, which hope to profit from Brexit. “[The UK] would like to make it easy to
