News

Panama City. The privatisation of Postal and Telegraph Services of Panama (COTEL) is on the Government’s agenda. During the last week, Ricardo Martinelli, President of the Republic, announced the measure in America Economía, a magazine with 90 thousand subscribers in Latin America.



“We have an inefficient Post-Office System. One of the things we must devote ourselves to do is to fix the Postal System. In fact, we must think of privatising the Postal Services”, declared the Head of State. “We have the worst officers working there, we have underpaid and unmotivated employees”, he added.



However, it seems contradictory that at the beginning of his activities (July 29^th, 2009) the ex Director of COTEL, Exberto Cedeño, asserted that the company would not be privatised. “The Postal service has a social duty to fulfil with 123 Post Offices throughout the country”, he maintained at that moment.



Now everything seems to indicate that the decision has changed. Roxana Mendez, Government’s Minister, confirmed that two proposals for privatising are being evaluated as well as the possibility of constituting a mixed model organisation in which part of the shares would be owned by the State and the rest by private capitals.



According to Méndez, COTEL urgently needs to “modernise its work team by hiring human resources qualified to meet the challenges of technology”



Although the decision is not official, the organisation’s 800 officers, joined together in the Employees Association, ASECOTEL, are concerned about their labour future. According to Ismael Ruiz, President of this association, “all these months we have been told that they would not be privatising the institution. They lied to us.”



Source: Diario La Prensa

Ohigginis Arcia Jaramillo oarcia@prensa.com