Brexit deal could cost us £50 BILLION and take until the mid 2020s to get signed, former Brussels envoy warns

BRITAIN’s former EU envoy has warned that Brexit talks will descend into a “fist fight” and see Theresa May handed a £50 billion divorce bill.

In a doom-laden warning, Europhile Sir Ivan Rogers yesterday said a new free trade deal with the EU may not be signed until the mid-2020s.

He told MPs a ‘Hard Brexit’ would be a disaster for the economy- and push back the process of any new trade talks with the EU for years.

And sparking fury from Brexit supporters he said the threats of a divorce bill from EU negotiators were “genuine” given the Brexit vote had “exploded a bomb” under the EU’s budget.

Sir Ivan warned we may even be on the hook for pension liabilities for years to come to officials who have served in Brussels over the past 40 years.

He told MPs: “I’m not saying this is right or wrong.

“I think there will be a lot of things the other side will argue that will be profoundly wrong and will be trying to present us with a much larger bill than we would ever want to pay or think legally justified.”

But he said: “However much we dispute this they do think we have exploded a bomb under the multi-annual financial framework.

“The mere fact of our exiting during the seven-year financial framework causes them immense financial difficulty.”

Sir Ivan – who blasted Downing Street’s muddled thinking on Brexit when quitting last month – was immediately panned Tory MPs who blame him for David Cameron’s botched EU renegotiation.

Trade Secretary Liam Fox dismissed the suggestion of an exit bill as “absurd”.

He told a parliamentary committee: “I find it bizarre because the UK is using a legal power that we have under the Lisbon Treaty, a provision that was freely entered into by all our European partners.

“Why should they then turn round to say that we should pay their costs for a process that everbody equalled into at the time?”

Former Tory Chancellor Norman Lamont said a divorce bill would be “unacceptable”. And he told the BBC: “Ultimately I think this will come down to politics.” He added that threatening to pull funding previously committed to the bloc was a “weapon in our hands too”.

Sir Ivan admitted that much of the Brexit negotiations initially would centre around “what to argue about”.
He said there would “undoubtedly” be name calling and an “extremely feisty atmosphere” with the talks ending up in a “mercantilist fist fight”.

Sir Ivan insisted he wasn’t behind the explosive leak in December where it was claimed he told Theresa May it could take 10 years to strike a new free trade deal with the EU.

But he told a cross party group of MPs: “Looking at the record of previous free trade agreements the EU has negotiated it has taken an awful lot of time and there is then a ratification process.

“The senior beltway wisdom has it that the combination of negotiating a free trade agreement and ratification would probably take until early mid-2020s for ratification.”

It emerged last November that Michel Barnier, the Commission’s chief Brexit negotiator, planned to pursue Britain for as £50 billion exit bill.

His team was looking at an upper estimate based on unpaid budget commitments, loan guarantees and spending on UK-based projects.

In December, arch Brexit backer Iain Duncan Smith said the idea was a “dreadful joke”.