Brexit Talks Reveal Weakness of the U.K.'s Hand, Stubb Says

(Bloomberg) -- The progress of Brexit talks is making it abundantly clear just how weak the U.K.’s negotiating hand is, according to Alexander Stubb, the former prime minister of Finland.

“Your negotiating cards are actually very weak when you’re trying to leave the EU and that’s what we’re seeing in the process of negotiations right now,” Stubb, who’s now vice president at the European Investment Bank, said in an interview with Francine Lacqua on Bloomberg TV in Davos.

“The difficulty for the U.K. is to understand that when you join the European Union, you don’t join on your own terms, you join on the EU terms,” he said. “And when you leave the European Union, exactly the same thing is true.”

The U.K. and the remaining 27 EU countries will reach a deal on financial services “in the long run,” Stubb said. “The nature of European negotiations is that you find a last minute deal at some stage and then everyone will be disappointed, the solution is always suboptimal.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Francine Lacqua in London at flacqua@bloomberg.net, Kati Pohjanpalo in Helsinki at kpohjanpalo@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Tasneem Hanfi Brögger at tbrogger@bloomberg.net, Jonas Bergman

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