The chamber kicked off 2019 by discussing the state of play in three different areas, welcoming high-level and expert speakers.
With Kris Dekeyser, Director “Policy and Strategy” at DG Competition at the European Commission, we tackled merger policy. As the trends have shown the number of merger notifications submitted to the Commission has been increasing over the last years, with 2018 witnessing the highest number of notifications ever. While those were concentrated in some sectors at first (e.g. pharma), they then expanded to other sectors and will continue to increase for the coming years. To read more about this event, click here.
Next, with Gunnar Hökmark MEP we looked at the conclusions drawn from the Banking Union. In response to the crisis, a number of initiatives were put in place (the Single Rulebook in particular) in order to strengthen financial stability, and ensure that the banking sector is safe, reliable, and better supervised for the single market. Our report on the event can be found here.
On a totally different note, we then tackled the curious case of the Border in the Case of a No Deal Brexit with an expert panel, and learned that in the UK alone, there are up to 250,000 companies that only trade within the EU. Each one of these companies will need to consult a customs specialist in order to ensure they have the right certification when the UK begins to trade with the EU from the outside. However, a key issue lies with the amount of customs experts that exist, as it takes up to 3 years to become a fully trained and operational customs specialist. To read more about this pertinent topic, click here.
To make sure you don’t miss out on an event in the future, visit our website to see what we have coming up.
Stay tuned for our next monthly overview!
Bernada Cunj
Head of Policy and EU Affairs
The British Chamber of Commerce | EU & Belgium
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