A pro-Brexit lobby group transferred its website registration address to the European Union to avoid losing its .eu top-level domain, Irish media reported on Thursday.

Leave.eu is a website funded by UKIP funder Arron Banks that campaigned for Brexit. It is not affiliated with the official Vote Leave Brexit campaign but was an influential lobby group in the lead up to the 2016 Brexit referendum and subsequent negotiations.

The .eu country code top-level domain is reserved for people and entities residing in the EU. As the UK has now left the bloc, the European registry for the .eu domain, EURid, suspended all British-based .eu websites.

In a bid to avoid losing its domain name, which would affect its brand and its search rankings, the parent organization, Better for the Country, changed its address to a town in Ireland, according to the Irish Times and Euractiv.

Euractiv reported that Leave.eu was one of 80,000 British .eu websites that EURid wrote to ahead of the Brexit cut-off date. 

British operators of .eu domains have until March 31 to change their address to the EU or prove that they are EU citizens, or they will lose access entirely.

Banks ran the Leave.eu group with Andy Wigmore, who confirmed to French news agency AFP that they had shifted their registered office to Waterford, a town on Ireland’s southeast coast.

Wigmore defended the move in comments to British newspaper The Independent, saying: “Yes we did it and why not? Anyone can do it and thousands of companies have.”

He told the paper that the move would not include the transfer of any staff or economic activity out of the UK to the EU.

The news bought mockery on social media and accusations of hypocrisy.

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan has approached the United Nations (UN) Secretary General, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the European Union (EU) to seek immediate release of Kashmiri human rights activist and political leader Asiya Andrabi who remains incarcerated in Indian infamous Tihar Jalil.

At his weekly news briefing on Thursday, FO Spokesperson Zahid Hafeez Chaudhri said that the Indian authorities have put Andrabi on trial on trumped up charges, deliberately accelerated the tribal and set aside due process, reflecting malicious intent with clear indications of looming judicial murder.

The spokesperson said that India’s blatant attempts to portray the legitimate struggle of Kashmiris as terrorism and to prosecute its leaders through concocted cases is a clear violation of the UN Charter, UN Security Council and UN General Assembly resolutions and international human rights law.

Meanwhile, at the United Nations, Pakistan has urged to develop common strategies and plans to find just solutions for complex and protracted challenges, including the conflicts of Kashmir and Palestine.

According to a statement, a Permanent Representative of Pakistan to the world body, Mohammad Aamir Khan told the UN Security Council that foreign occupation, intervention and aggression have led to untold suffering for millions in the Muslim world. He said that peoples of Jammu and Kashmir and Palestine, continue to struggle for their inalienable right to self-determination and the end of foreign occupation.

Amir also asked the OIC to play an important role to apprise the international community of the legitimate concerns of the Muslim world, including the resurgence of Islamophobia.

(Adds details and background)

ROME, Jan 7 (Reuters) – Italy plans to spend more than 222 billion euros ($272 billion) from various European Union funds to revive its coronavirus-battered economy, a draft government document seen by Reuters showed on Thursday.

Rome is entitled to more than 200 billion euros from a European emergency programme designed to help those EU nations hardest hit by the coronavirus.

The 222 billion euro scheme includes resources from the emergency fund and other European programmes, including an agricultural fund, the document showed.

The plan still needs to be approved by the cabinet which will likely meet before the end of this week, according to government sources.

Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte is facing internal opposition from former premier Matteo Renzi, whose centrist Italia Viva party polls at no more than around 3% but is crucial for the government’s survival.

Italia Viva has criticized Conte’s first proposals on how to spend the funds and has repeatedly threatened to withdraw its support if the government did not agree to put more money into critical sectors such as healthcare and infrastructure.

Renzi is also upset about the government’s reluctance to ask for a loan from the euro zone’s bailout fund (ESM), which he says could help provide more funds to the country’s coronavirus-hit hospitals.

Based on the new draft document, the government plans to increase its healthcare investments to 18 billion euros and allocate 4 billion euros to broadband and other high-tech communication infrastructures, including 5G networks.

The Treasury estimates in the draft that the investment programmes can boost GDP growth by 3 percentage points by 2026.

Before Italy was hit by a second wave of the pandemic, the government estimated in September that GDP would rebound 6% in 2021, following a contraction of 9% in 2020.

Leave.EU has left the UK, as Brexit forced the Eurosceptic campaign group to choose between its name and its country.

According to domain name registration records, the organisation, founded by businessman and activist Arron Banks, picked the former. The website is now registered in the name of Sean Power, the chief executive of the Ireland-based professional services company BSG.

When asked, however, Power, who is based in Waterford, insisted that he had no involvement with the organisation. When informed that his name and contact details were present on the registration, he said he would be “looking into the matter”.

Leave.EU has had some time to consider its move. The organisation is named after its web address, but .EU domain names can only be held by businesses or individuals based in the EU or wider European Economic Area.

As the Brexit transition period drew to an end in 2019, the British owners of .EU domain names – of which there were estimated to be about 340,000 – started to express alarm that no deal had been made, meaning that they would have to give up their websites when Britain left the EU.

Initially, Leave.EU suggested it was fine with that outcome. “If we leave with no deal our job is done,” Leave.EU’s communications chief, Andy Wigmore, told the Guardian in 2019. “No need for Leave.EU any more. Cheers all round, I’m sure!”

But in July that year, the EU threw a lifeline to organisations, confirming that UK-based owners of .EU domains could continue to operate – provided the actual registration was transferred to an EU citizen.

For companies which did not take that step, it is not too late to follow Leave.EU’s lead. According to UK government advice: “On 1 January 2021, any UK registrant who cannot meet the eligibility criteria will have their .eu domain names withdrawn. A withdrawn domain name no longer functions … and can no longer support any active services (such as websites or email).

“Withdrawn domain names will not be available to any other entity for a further 12 months. On 1 January 2022, all the withdrawn domain names will be revoked and made available for registration by other entities.”

But a grace period, lasting until 31 March this year, allows registrants to transfer suspended domain names to an EU-based owner, or any person with EU citizenship.

LONDON, Jan 7 (Reuters) – More than 50 British retailers, including Tesco and Marks & Spencer, face potential tariffs for re-exporting goods to the European Union, their trade body said on Thursday, amid warnings this could make Britain less competitive.

Britain clinched a Brexit trade deal with the EU on Dec. 24 that was billed as preserving its zero-tariff and zero-quota access to the bloc’s single market of 450 million consumers.

But it has since emerged that goods or commodities that are sourced from outside, and even inside, of the trading bloc that are brought into the UK, and then re-exported to the EU attract a tariff under so called rules of origin.

“We appreciate that the rules of origin in the Trade and Co-operation Agreement were designed to be facilitative on trade in goods, but we need a solution which genuinely reflects the needs of UK-EU supply and distribution chains for goods,” said William Bain of the British Retail Consortium (BRC).

The BRC, which represents more than 170 major retailers including the big supermarkets, is working with members on short-term options and is seeking dialogue with the government and the EU on longer-term solutions to mitigate the effects of the new tariffs.

“Tariff free does not feel like tariff free when you read the fine print (of the deal),” said Marks & Spencer (M&S) CEO Steve Rowe.

“For big businesses there will be time consuming workarounds but for a lot of others this means paying tariffs or rebasing into the EU.”

The issues are complex.

There are varying limits on the percentage of a product that can come from outside the EU but still qualify as a non-tariff product under the free trade agreement.

For example, in dairy it is 20% by weight, for white chocolate it is 40% by weight.

There are also rules around “transformation”, covering what is required to turn something that contains say three products from countries outside the FTA into one UK product. For example, stoning dates from Israel is not permissible, but smoking or pickling products is.

“This makes unravelling the genome sequence look simple,” said M&S chairman Archie Norman, who fears the issue will damage overall UK competitiveness.

Tesco, Britain’s biggest retailer, said it was in talks with the UK and Irish governments about the issue and was working to find a satisfactory resolution as quickly as possible. (Reporting by James Davey. Editing by Jane Merriman)