Commissie stemt in met tijdelijke staatssteun Griekse posterijen (en)

The European Commission has authorised under EU state aid rules grants and capital injections to the Greek post office amounting to a total sum of € 415 million. These different financing measures were destined to foster the modernisation of the Greek post office. In particular, the aid has allowed the post office to purchase automation equipment, upgrade its fleet of delivery vehicles and equip its offices with information technology. These improvements were necessary as the quality of the universal postal service in Greek was below EU standards. As the aid is limited to meeting costs of modernisation and does not lead to an undue distortion of competition, the Commission decided to approve the aid.

In April 2003, Greece notified a grant amounting to € 80 million in order to finance an overhaul of the Greek post office. The Greek post office is entrusted with the provision of the universal postal service in Greece and of other non-postal services of general economic interest, such as the provision of basic banking facilities. The aid aims at upgrading the Greek Post's postal and banking infrastructures. In particular, the aid has allowed the Greek post office to install sorting equipment for automatic address reading, to create a brand new automatic sorting centre and to upgrade its fleet of delivery vehicles. It also financed the development of a new model for measuring service quality and monitoring of service quality. These improvements were necessary in order to provide a high quality universal postal service that matches the EU standards.

In its decision the Commission has also approved modernisation grants of € 42 million given to the Greek post office between 2000 and 2002. The Commission's investigation revealed that these grants were also strictly necessary for the fulfilment of a satisfactory quality level of the Greek post office's general interest missions.

An amount of €92 million of the above grants derives from EU funds (Second and Third Community Support Framework).

Finally, the Commission found that capital injections amounting to a total of € 293 million granted between 1997 and 2001 were compatible with the EC rules, since they only aimed at covering the debt the Greek post office incurred in providing public services.