Brussels, 24/10/2003 (Agence Europe) - As we have already pointed out, the European Commission announced that it was granting 17 European postal operators a further five-year exemption for their terminal cost system (REIMS II agreement). Terminal dues are the remuneration postal operators pay to each other for the delivery of crossborder mail in the country of destination. The seventeen operators taking part are those established in all EU Member States (except the Netherlands), as well as Norway, Iceland and Switzerland. The Commission has noted that the system for which it had granted exemption to the competition rules (ban on agreements) in 1999 had entailed substantial improvements in the quality of crossborder delivery services. It therefore decided to renew the exemption, under the following conditions: 1) terminal costs must reflect the real cost of distribution; 2) should stringent quality-of-serve targets not be met, penalties will be applied; 3) by virtue of the new postal directive which opened outgoing crossborder delivery to competition on 1 January 2003, signatories of the agreement will be obliged to deliver incoming crossborder mail on behalf of private operators under the same terms and conditions as they apply among each other. Hitherto, third parties had to return the mail to the outgoing postal operator in the country of origin and pay the full tariff, or carry the mail themselves to the country of destination and pay the full domestic tariff; and 4) advantageous domestic tariffs for crossborder bulk delivery must be made available to the other parties of the REIMS II agreement as well as to third party postal operators.