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EU, Russia progress in talks on friendly settlement of 2-3 WTO suits — minister

Russia filed two lawsuits against the EU while Brussels applied to the World Trade Organization with four suits against Moscow

© ITAR-TASS/Dmitry Burlakov

BRUSSELS, May 18. /TASS/. The European Union and Russia have progressed in talks on friendly settlement of 2-3 suits within the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Russian Economic Development Minister Alexey Ulyukayev said Monday.

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"There are disputes initiated by the European side, there are disputes initiated by the Russian side, we’ve progressed in providing pretrial settlement of those issues, at least of 2-3 of them," the minister said.

As was reported earlier, Russia filed two lawsuits against the EU to the WTO. The first one (December 2013) concerned energy corrections while the second one (April 2014) was related to the Third Energy Package.

In its turn, Brussels has applied to the World Trade Organization with four suits against Moscow. The first investigation was launched in 2013 regarding utilization fee for cars made abroad, while in April 2014 the European Union filed a lawsuit against Russia with relation to ban on pork imports from Europe. The third suit was tied with Russia’s antidumping import customs duties on light commercial vehicles from Germany and Italy. The fourth claim launched in October 2014 relates to the EU complaints on the size of Russia’s duties on paper, refrigerators and palm oil imports. On the latter dispute, despite the first three ones, a group of arbiters has not been created yet: currently, the two sides are negotiating its personal composition.

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