The current contract with bpost expires at the end of this year. What will happen next is still unclear. Competitor PPP won the new concession (good for 125 million euros in government support; ed.), but the government does not seem to want to award that contract.
Temporarily extending the contract with bpost is an option, according to Minister of Finance Vincent Van Peteghem (CD&V). He emphasizes that this “must be clearly limited in time”.
During that transition phase, the government would then further consider how to continue supporting the distribution of newspapers in rural areas and to non-profit organizations and other non-commercial organizations. Fiscal support is a possibility, but Van Peteghem wants to avoid it becoming permanent “with a number of extra codes on the tax letter”.