Brussels, 25/01/2012 (Agence Europe) - On Wednesday 25 January 2012, the European Commission issued decisions requiring the recovery of incompatible state aid granted in Belgium and Germany to their incumbent post offices, bpost and Deutsche Post, and authorising the payment of state aid by France and Greece to their own incumbent post offices, La Poste and ELTA.
The Belgian state must recover from bpost €417 million plus interest payments as overpayment for the cost to the company, then known as La Poste, for the mailing of newspapers and magazines, a public service duty under the company's exclusive control until 2010 and for which it received payment of €5.2 billion from the state between 1992 and 2010.
Deutsche Post in Germany must repay to the German government incompatible aid in the range of €500 million to €1 billion for the period from 2003 onwards of the €37 bn of subsidies received by the company from 1995 onwards to fund the pension plans of civil servants following the privatisation of the former state monopoly post office. In addition to the subsidies, Deutsche Post benefitted during the same period from increased stamp prices to finance a further share of the civil servants' pension costs. Taking account of this extra relief, Deutsche Post has effectively borne significantly lower social contributions than its private competitors for services which were open to competition (e.g. parcel services or retail banking). Germany must calculate the exact amount of the aid to be refunded in line with the number of civil servants concerned and the related salary costs.
The Commission authorised French state aid for €1.9 billion for La Poste (the French post office) as partial payment of the cost of providing the public service of mailing newspapers and magazines to the public and providing postal services in remote areas from 2008 to 2012; and state aid of €52 million for the Greek post office (ELTA) to pay for updating of its public postal service from now until 2021 and to expand the range of services offered in remote regions, improve existing services and cut costs. (FG/transl.fl)