EU Member States voted Friday in favour of the European Commission’s proposal to impose definitive countervailing duties on imports of battery electric vehicles (BEVs) from China.
The European Commission said in a statement that its proposal has obtained the necessary support from EU Member States for the adoption of tariffs claiming it represents “another step towards the conclusion of the Commission’s anti-subsidy investigation”.
Ten EU countries representing 45.99 percent of the EU population voted in favour of the new proposal namely Bulgaria, Denmark, Estonia, France, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Latvia, the Netherlands and Poland.
Twelve countries abstained: Belgium, the Czech Republic, Greece, Spain, Croatia, Cyprus, Luxembourg, Austria, Portugal, Romania, Sweden and Finland. And five were against the new tariffs including Germany, Hungary, Malta, Slovenia and Slovakia.
The European Commission said that the EU and China will continue to “work hard” in parallel to “explore an alternative solution that would have to be fully WTO-compatible, adequate in addressing the injurious subsidisation established by the Commission’s investigation, monitorable and enforceable”.
The European Commission formally launched last month an anti-subsidy investigation into the imports of battery electric vehicles (BEV) from China to determine whether “BEV value chains in China benefit from illegal subsidisation and whether this subsidisation causes or threatens to cause economic injury to EU BEV producers”.
Source: Kuwait News Agency
