Germany dismisses report it might sell Post, Telekom pension receivables
Germany’s finance ministry dismissed as ‘speculation’ a newspaper report that it is considering partly plugging its budget deficit by selling the pension receivables it gets annually from the former state monopolies Deutsche Post World Net AG and Deutsche Telekom.
‘We don’t comment on such speculation,’ a finance ministry spokesman in Berlin said.
The report in the Financial Times Deutschland, citing unnamed sources, stated potential buyers could be private investment banks such as Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, as well as the state-development bank Kreditanstalt fuer Wiederaufbau (KfW).
The ministry supervises the pension fund of all civil servants. A huge number of Deutsche Post and Deutsche Telekom employees retained their status as civil servants even after the entities were transformed into private limited companies prior to their listings.
A spokesman for Deutsche Post said 65,000 of its 211,000 employees in Germany are still classified as civil servants. Some 33 pct of the gross pay of civil servants is set aside as pension contributions.
Last year, Deutsche Post transferred 664 mln eur to the ministry-supervised pension fund, while 809 mln came from Deutsche Telekom.
