Belgian postal company bpost has admitted that it may have broken the law in its handling of several government contracts. It is the latest of several scandals that have engulfed the group in recent months.
The company, which is 50.1% owned by the Belgian State, made the admission in a press release published late on Monday night. Specifically, bpost acknowledged that the profit margins on some of the services provided to the Belgian State "not be acceptable under applicable law".
It added that preliminary estimates suggest that the impact will cost the group "in the range of €25 million to €50 million" for the year 2023 alone.
The company stressed that the compliance review was "voluntarily launched" after another internal investigation conducted last year. This related to tenders for the distribution of newspapers and had also shown "non-compliance with the company's policies as well as indications of non-compliance with applicable laws". The scandal led to the dismissal of bpost CEO Dirk Tirez.
A succession of scandals
In remarks made early on Tuesday morning, Belgian Deputy Prime Minister and Postal Minister Petra de Sutter (Flemish Greens) noted if any illegal misplacement of government funds had occurred, the money will have to be repaid to the Belgian State.
De Sutter told Belga News Agency that "This would mean that bpost's overall profit will be lower than anticipated. We as a State cannot allow that there are contracts that have a wrong price, so we will act just as was the case in those other contracts."
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The current affair is the latest in a succession of scandals implicating bpost over the past few years. In addition to the scandal which led to Tirez's dismissal last year, in 2021 then-bpost CEO Jean-Paul Van Avermaet was fired after his suspected involvement in a price-fixing scandal involving various security and guarding companies.
Moreover, CEO of the bpost subsidiary AMP Benoît Dewaele was last month reported to have had his salary channelled through a consultancy over the period April 2021 to December 2022 in order to pay less tax. Dewaele's behaviour was later condemned as "unacceptable" by De Sutter.
