BRUSSELS (AP) European Union finance officials spent all day Tuesday roughing out key aspects of a new agency that would clean up broken banks and keep the costs of doing that from hitting taxpayers but fell short of a firm and final agreement just days before a year-end deadline.
"We've covered 95 percent of the distance," Pierre Moscovici, France's finance minister, told reporters early Wednesday, shortly after midnight. "I can't imagine that there'd be a failure."
Officials said the talks reached some general agreement on principles, after six months of haggling among their governments. Official comments afterward suggested those understandings point toward a compromise that could give national officials more say over what happens to troubled banks than under the original proposal, which put much of the power to decide an insolvent bank's fate at the European Union level.
"We have no formal result on the table" but have made "a huge leap forward," was how Lithuanian Finance Minister Rimantas Sadzius, who chaired Tuesday's meeting, summarized what was accomplished. He said there was agreement on "general principles that seem to be acceptable to this or that extent to everyone."
German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said he and the other ministers hammered out "a general understanding" with many details to be worked out at another finance ministers meeting on Dec. 18. That's the day before a summit of EU prime ministers and presidents is to seal the entire deal.
