Brussels, 05/12/2001 (Agence Europe) - The European Commission has decided that the Belgian postal operator, La Poste, abused its dominant position by using the monopoly it enjoys in general letter mail to impose a new business-to-business (B2B) service on client insurance companies. The new service, which exploits La Poste's financial resources and which is not covered by its monopoly, is in direct competition with the document exchange service provided by the British private firm, Hays. The Belgian operation has been fined EUR 2.5 million.
The facts are as follows: On 7 April 2000, Hays decides to file a complaint with the European Commission stating that the Belgian operator, La Poste, was seeking to eliminate its document exchange network by using methods that do not comply with European competition law. Thus, the Belgian postal operator, who granted preferential tariffs to insurance companies that were clients of its general mail service, sought to attract the same clients for its new B2B mail service, by doing away with the advantageous prices for companies that decided to use the rival service, in this case Hays. In order to continue enjoying the preferential prices, insurance companies were then forced to also subscribe to La Poste's business to business mail service. Hays, which was not able to compete with the tariff reduction granted by La Poste for its traditional mail services, therefore lost more and more of its traditional clients in Belgium, mainly made up of insurance companies. Considering that the complaint filed by the British company was based on serious justification, the Commission had sent, on 6 June this year, a letter of grievances against La Poste in which it informed it of the risks it was running if it did not put an end to its practice (see EUROPE of 7 June, pp.7/8). In response, La Poste abolished the "tying" practice between its two services by discontinuing the B2B mail service on 27 June 2001. The Commission decided that, although this "tying" practice had been abolished, its effect on Hays would continue and could lead to eliminating the latter from the Belgian market, with, as a result, the disappearance of the cross-border network for overnight document exchange that Hays had established between Belgium, on one hand, and the United Kingdom and France, on the other. The infringement thus had an adverse effect on trade between Member States, sending a strong negative signal to foreign competitors who wish to do business in Belgium.
The decision to impose a fine on the Belgian operator is the fifth in a series of decisions concerning the postal services, adopted since December 2000 (two of the fines were against Deutsche Post) by the Commission, thus bearing witness to its extreme vigilance against monopoly practices that exploit the resources gained from monopoly to extend their dominant position to markets with open competition.