Luxembourg, 25/06/2007 (Agence Europe) - On Monday 25 June, the Competitiveness Council reached an agreement on a general orientation that is expected to respect deadlines for setting up the European Institute of Technology (EIT) in 2008. Research ministers agreed on funding of up to €308.7 million. A budgetary trialogue agreed on this amount a week ago (EUROPE 9451). Over the 2008-13 period the number of knowledge and innovation communities (thematic networks) to be set up will stand at two or three, with a political priority on: 1) climate change and 2) renewable energy sources. The final question on which ministers will have to agree, is the EIT linguistic regime. They decided to grant equal treatment to all official Union languages for the official documents of the institute. Working documents and reports, however, will not be translated into all languages. The next stage is that of voting at the European Parliament's ITRE committee. In principle this is expected for 9 July. (oj)