European leaders remained unmoved to the U.K.'s Brexit proposals — at least until Article 50 is triggered and formal divorce negotiations begin, the European Commission Vice-President told CNBC.
U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May outlined the country's plans to make a clean break from the European Union (EU) on Tuesday. In a wide-ranging speech, May confirmed the U.K. is destined to leave the single market and that a potential Brexit deal with the EU would require a parliamentary vote.
"(The European Commission's) thinking in general on Brexit-related issues is we are not going into negotiations or pre-negotiations or taking positions before the U.K. formally notifies its intention to leave," European Commission Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis told CNBC on Wednesday in Davos, Switzerland.
Theresa May has pledged to begin formal negotiations by triggering Article 50 - the formal process that starts the Brexit talks - before the end of March.
The former Latvian Prime Minister conceded that the European Commission expects to see a negative economic impact for both the EU and the U.K. as a consequence of Brexit.
"For the EU, until the end of this year the estimate is somewhere between 0.2 and 0.4 percentage points. For the U.K., depending on the choices which are being made it can be bigger... between 1 and 2.5 percentage points and indeed this economic impact will depend on certain choices which will be made," he added.
