OREANDA-NEWS. July 09, 2012. “Russian Post” reasonably charged fees for some services related to mail acceptance. FAS Commission terminated a case against “Russian Post”, opened upon signs of abusing market dominance (Part 1 Article 10 of the Federal Law “On Protection of Competition”), reported the press-centre of FAS Russia.

FAS initiated the case against “Russian Post” Federal State Unitary Enterprise for violating the antimonopoly law upon a complaint from consumers. According to the complaint, “Russian Post” fixed and charged fees from consumers (both physical persons and legal entities) for rendering several additional services related to mail acceptance, in particular, for verifying enclosures of a postal item, sent with a list of enclosures (for domestic postal items): parcels, registered letters with declared value / small parcels, including “first-class postal items“

Under Clauses 2 and 3 of the Regulations on government regulations of the tariffs for publicly-accessible telecommunications and publicly-accessible postal services, approved by a Decree of the Government of the Russian Federation, the tariffs for the services of publicly-accessible postal services rendered by providers - holders of natural monopolies, included in the Register of holders of natural monopolies, are subject to government regulation by the Federal Tariff Service.

According to the List of publicly-accessible telecommunications and publicly-accessible postal services with government regulation of tariffs, publicly-accessible postal services include forwarding domestic letter-post items (postal cards (standard, registered), letters and small parcels (standard, registered, of insured value)). Tariffs are calculated on the basis of the data obtained in course of separate costs accounting conducted by providers.

During the investigation, the Federal Tariff Service reported that under the Regulations on separate costs-and-revenues accounting by providers of postal services, the costs of services for verifying enclosures must be accounted separately and are not included in the costs of forwarding domestic mail items.

FAS also took into consideration that postal items can be sent with a delivery confirmation, a list of enclosures, as cash-on-delivery consignment. Thus, such postal items are consumer choice. If the costs for verifying enclosures to mail items are included for calculating tariffs for forwarding domestic mail items, consumers sending postal items using other methods (without a list of enclosures) will be put in a discriminatory position since they will have to pay for the services not provided to them.

Having considered all case circumstances, on 25th June 2012 the FAS Commission terminated the case under Clause 2 Part 1 Article 48 of the Federal Law “On Protection of Competition” (absence of violations of the antimonopoly law in the actions (omissions) scrutinized by the Commission).