Those were the words from my block rep. When I told him my thoughts on not negotiating an LOA outside of contract negotiations, he said that another view is that they do not want to have to give up something during negotiations for an FDA LOA, when they could negotiate it prior to a TA and not have to give up anything for it.

If they are going to do cost based negotiating, then I say that the savings to the company for an FDA in Europe far exceeds anything that the company would ever be willing to give us for bidding it. Thus, they are the ones gaining with an agreement on an LOA for the FDA, not us, so they need to give up something equal on the other side for us.