Dutch minister rejects tighter post oversight

A Dutch minister rejected calls on Thursday for tighter supervision of dominant Dutch mail company TNT NV when the post market is fully opened to competition next year.
“I do not share the view that OPTA is a toothless tiger,” junior economy minister Frank Heemskerk said in The Hague at a parliamentary debate of the new post law, referring to the post and telecoms regulator.
Heemskerk, responsible within the government for postal liberalisation, acknowledged that supervision was necessary to ensure that all post companies had a fair chance to compete, but said the new law would provide regulators with adequate powers.
Politicians both from the left and the right had questioned whether OPTA and anti-trust authority NMa had sufficient means to deal with complaints after TNT loses its monopoly on letters of up to 50 grammes, almost half of the 2-billion-euro Dutch mail market.
Heemskerk said the agencies’ staffing would be reviewed as part of the budget process later this year.
He added that the ministry would fine-tune the postal law to avoid TNT granting its budget unit, Netwerk VSP, better terms than competitors in giving access to its network. TNT’s Dutch mail business is one the country’s biggest employers with about 59,000 people, but its competitors, privately held Sandd and Deutsche Post’s Selekt Mail, work with few permanent staff and pay carriers by the number of items delivered.
Heemskerk said the requirement of a labour agreement could pose a barrier to entry, and he noted that Dutch labour laws already offered people who worked on the basis of assignments to sue if they believed that they should have a proper contract.
“You can go to court to demand a labour contract and then the burden of proof is with the employer,” Heemskerk said.
Heemskerk said he expected to stick to Jan. 1, 2008, as the date for TNT to lose its remaining monopoly even though the law would provide an “emergency break” if for example Germany did not open its market at the same time.
“You only use an emergency brake if there’s really an emergency,” he said. “The way it looks now it will not be necessary.”
Parliament will vote on the new postal law as early as next week.
TNT shares fell 1.5 percent to 33.36 euros by 1100 GMT while the DJ Stoxx industrials index fell 1.1 percent.