(Bloomberg) -- British Prime Minister Theresa May must make the next move on the path to Brexit by setting out how the U.K. sees its future relationship with the European Union, European Commission Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis said.
“The ball is now in the U.K.'s court,” Dombrovskis said in an interview with Bloomberg Television on Friday at the annual International Monetary Fund meetings in Washington. “It's up to them to come up with a formal notification about their intention to leave the EU.”
Valdis Dombrovskis
May said earlier this month that this notification -- officially triggering Article 50 of the EU's Lisbon Treaty -- will come by the end of March at the latest. While the EU has said it won't enter into any negotiations with the U.K. until that happens, it has called on the British government to reduce uncertainty surrounding its position by clarifying how it wants to work with the bloc in the years to come.
Dombrovskis reiterated that there can be no “cherry picking” of the elements of the EU that the U.K. wants to keep and that membership of the bloc's single market comes with a commitment to allow EU citizens to live and work without any restrictions -- something that May's government has said it wants to bring to an end.
--With assistance from Francine Lacqua and Tom Keene
To contact the reporter on this story: Ian Wishart in Washington at iwishart@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alan Crawford at acrawford6@bloomberg.net, Sarah McGregor, Brendan Murray
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