 Ichida criticizes government for trying to force the people to accept privatization as established fact The government on April 4 approved an outline of a bill to privatize the country's postal services, while maintaining a nationwide network of post offices by law and allowing new companies to buy back their stocks. The outline provides that the government in 2007 will privatize the present Japan Post and create four companies (over-the-counter services, postal savings, postal mail, and postal life insurance) under a joint holding company. The holding company will sell off all its stocks in postal savings and life insurance businesses by 2017. The outline allows the four companies to buy back their shares so that they can again operate as one postal group following their full privatization in 2017. The government will explain the outline to the Liberal Democratic and Komei parties as well as Prime Minister Koizumi Jun'ichiro so that the bill will be submitted in the current Diet session by the end of April. Japanese Communist Party Secretariat Head Ichida Tadayoshi at a news conference on the same day said, "What is the aim of the privatization? Without answering this most basic question, the government is trying to force people to accept the conclusion that privatization is inevitable." Ichida pointed out that the government is pushing for the postal privatization at the request of the U.S. government, with banking and life-insurance industries as well as foreign-capital companies in its background, and criticized the privatization "for abandoning small-sum postal savings or insurance services in the interest of commercial banks." "The problem is that the government plan mentions nothing about how to collect one trillion yen, which it says is needed to establish a 'local community contribution fund' to maintain equal service across the country, or how much money it will actually need," he added. (end) |