Inquiry into undelivered mail in Germany
German prosecutors said Sunday they had opened an inquiry into an undisclosed number of post office officials suspected of involvement in a scheme to sell mail that could not be delivered. A spokesman for the prosecutor’s office in the western city of Bonn partially confirmed a report by the weekly news magazine Der Spiegel. It claimed the post office had been for years sending packages its staff was unable to deliver to an intermediary in Bavaria, who then put them on sale.
A Deutsche Post customer had instituted legal proceedings against the company after having read a report in the news magazine Der Spiegel which revealed that the post had sold unhdreds of thousands of allegedly undeliverable parcels to a bargain dealer in Bavaria. However, a large numbe rof these consignments could in fact have been correctly delivered to their addressees, according to the magazine. The bargain dealer repeatedly found parcesl with fully legible address labels or receiving slips; often an address would only be slightly wrong. A Deutsche Post spokesman said that his company could not possibly have an economic interest in systematically treating parcels as undeliverable and selling them on. He declined to comment on the ongoing inquiry.
