Brussels, 23/09/2002 (Agence Europe) - The Union is on the verge of finalising its assessment of "compensations" secured from the United States since the deployment on the other side of the Atlantic of an arsenal of prohibitive surtaxes against foreign steel. The official report, that should be adopted any day now through the written procedure, will be submitted to the Fifteen on Friday so as to enable them to decide, on 30 September, on the fate of the sanctions they are threatening to take without waiting for a judgement by the World Trade Organisation on the legality of the American provisions. One can, however, expect a further pushing back of the deadline, if only because the verdict in Geneva has been announced for March, or only in six months, that the legal ground for early retaliation is rather vague and thus weak, and that the next six months may also be used to continue along this path to stretch out the dual threat of immediate sanctions (378 million euro) and long-term ones (606 million euro). It is also on Friday that the end of consultation on the categories of products to be covered by the definitive safeguard device that the Union is to put in place will end, the same day, at the end of the preventive measures taken last March in view of countering the "more than likely" flooding of the European market by steel from the American market. The Commission recently proposed reducing this device's field of application (that Washington has just formally denounced in Geneva) from 15 to 7 categories, leading to a wave of protests among the Fifteen. Today, it considers that for certain products, "the situation is clear" - they must be covered or excluded - but that for others, that is still not the case.