EU country vote on Chinese EV duties delayed

BRUSSELS — The EU’s national trade experts will not vote next week to impose duties on made-in-China electric vehicles, three EU diplomats told POLITICO, with the point taken off the agenda of a Sept. 25 meeting of the bloc’s Trade Defense Instruments Committee.

To enable the vote, the European Commission first needs to formally share the definitive findings of its anti-subsidy investigation with national governments, which it has not yet done. With no new date set for the vote, the week of Sept. 30 now looks to be the earliest possibility, two of the diplomats said.

“They took it off the agenda but didn’t say anything as to why,” said one of the diplomats, who like the others was granted anonymity to discuss the sensitive information. It was unclear whether the Sept. 25 meeting would go ahead without the vote.

Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao is in Brussels on Wednesday and Thursday, when he will meet the bloc’s trade chief Valdis Dombrovskis in search of a compromise that could avert the duties. These range from 7.8 percent to 35.3 percent and are meant to cancel out subsidies the Chinese government has lavished on its electric vehicle makers.

If that doesn’t work, Beijing hopes to convince enough countries to vote against confirming the duties for five years in the Trade Defense Instruments Committee so that an appeal procedure is triggered.

The committee convenes civil servants based in the 27 EU capitals and meets regularly to express its opinion on anti-dumping and anti-subsidy matters that the Commission investigates.

Measures rarely get voted down in the TDI committee, and the Commission has never been defeated in an appeal, which to succeed in blocking the duties would require a so-called qualified majority of 15 countries representing 65 percent of the bloc’s population.