Britain will lobby U.S., Canada over Bombardier dispute: Hammond

[October 02, 2017]  MANCHESTER, England (Reuters) - Finance minister Philip Hammond said on Monday Britain would continue to lobby the United States over a trade dispute with Canadian planemaker Bombardier, but said there were limits to what it could achieve.

Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond arrives at the Conservative Party's conference in Manchester, October 2, 2017. REUTERS/Phil Noble

The U.S. slapped a preliminary 220 percent tariff on Bombardier's CSeries jets, whose wings are made at a plant in Belfast, last week following a complaint from Boeing <BA.N>.

"We've lobbied the U.S. government hard on this issue, but in the end this is a quasi-judicial decision where a citizen or a company makes a complaint and a government department adjudicates it."

"We will go on talking to the U.S. government and the Canadian government in order to protect the jobs at Bombardier in Belfast."

"We have a very, very special relationship with the United States but of course every country, the UK, the U.S., others, all have our own internal domestic processes, our own legal systems and we can't necessarily always ensure that they work in a way that we would like."

(Reporting by William James, writing by Kate Holton, editing by Elizabeth Piper)

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