GENEVA, Feb 11 (Reuters) - A free trade agreement between the European Union and South Korea could be signed in the next few weeks, offering great potential for services exports, a British financial sector lobby group said on Wednesday.
But International Financial Services London, representing banks, accountants and other financial industries, said it was disappointed that some European manufacturing groups opposed a deal and were calling for negotiations to be suspended.
"With the first contraction in world trade for many years, it is all the more important that trade-expanding agreements of this kind should be negotiated and brought into effect," said John Cooke, chairman of the group's Liberalisation of Trade in Services (LOTIS) committee.
Cooke said in a statement it would be commercially wrong to slow down or abandon the talks and would also send a signal that the European Union was ready to turn away from opportunities in goods and services that were on offer.
"That would be a huge mistake, at the very moment when trade negotiators should be doing their utmost to advance the cause of maintaining and expanding global trade," Cooke said.
Cooke also called for renewed efforts to reach a deal in the WTO's seven-year-old Doha round, which service sector lobbyists have often complained neglects their interests.
European carmakers have expressed concern that Brussels might agree to cut import tariffs on South Korean cars without getting in return a deal to clear away red tape that they say holds them back in the Asian country's car market.
The European Union is South Korea's second largest export market after China, while South Korea is the EU's fourth largest non-European trade partner. Trade between the two is worth about $100 billion.
South Korea has agreed a free-trade deal with the United States, but neither side has ratified it because of a row over trade in beef and concerns by many Democrats that the deal does not do enough to open up South Korea's car market. (Reporting by Jonathan Lynn; Editing by Janet Lawrence)