Britain will not become a member of the Canada-led Defence, Security and Resilience Bank, a source told Reuters, in a report carried by The Globe and Mail. Instead, the two governments said on Sunday they would build a framework for co-operation between the bank and Britain's own Multilateral Defence Mechanism.
According to a second source, the countries could not agree on where the bank's headquarters would be, how much joint procurement it would handle, lending to members, or rules for admitting new members.
Under the arrangement described, the British-backed mechanism would concentrate on speeding up defence investment and pooling purchases across Nato allies to cut costs, while the Canadian-led bank would support defence industries and supply chains, mainly through lending to individual governments. The bank has struggled to win backing from larger European countries.
Source: The Globe and Mail (Reuters)
