PARIS (Bloomberg). France made the request on Aug. 3 after PSA/Peugeot-Citroen said it would close a factory near Paris and eliminate 14,000 jobs due to falling sales and demand. European Union regulators rejected France’s demand to monitor imports of South Korean cars more closely, according to the EU and South Korea’s Trade Ministry.
“The European Commission told us on Oct. 22 that they officially notified the French government that it will not introduce prior surveillance on South Korean cars, as France had requested,” the ministry said on Monday.EU spokesman John Clancy confirmed that France’s request had been rejected because the legal conditions for taking action weren’t met. The European Commission will remain “vigilant” and won’t hesitate to use available tools when needed, he said.
“Even if imports into the EU of cars from Korea indeed increased over the last months, there was no indication that such an increase was concentrated in France,” Clancy said in a statement. The Commission was due to decide whether to act on the French call for EU-wide surveillance of imports of Korean autos barely a year after the bloc began phasing out a 10 percent duty.
