outcome was a letter of resignation on the next day.
7. Because of the obligation to give 6 months notice, Mr Botto, in theory remains at the Bureau until the end of this year. It remains to be seen how active his participation will be or indeed if he departs even earlier on health grounds. In any event, there will be at least 8 months leading up to the next Congress in Seoul when Mr Ascandoni (the current Deputy DG and candidate for DG) will have the unexpected opportunity of taking the reins. This is seen as a slice of good luck for Mr Ascandoni and a draw- back for Tom Leavey who seems to have shot himself in the foot.
UPU Budget(Committee 2 and Plenary)
8. The 1994 budget was fixed at 30 548 630 Swiss francs making the contribution unit for 1994 32 620 Swiss francs based on 936.5 units (an increase from 32 310 SF based on 945.5 units). This was because of requests granted to Bangladesh, Belarus and Cuba to come down a contribution class. Our annual contribution will now be around £742,000.
Restructure of Union (WP 3/3, Committee 3 and Plenary
9. Although it looks as though the Ernst and Young proposal could get through the next Executive Council, there is still a lot of work to do between now and then to sell it to the Restricted Unions. if this cannot be done, it does not stand a hope of getting through Congress. In the meantime we need to define the bodies much more clearly and also
to
establish more of a hierarchical arrangement. Many countries including Japan just cannot accept that the Regulatory Council and Operations Council should have more ΟΙ less equal status. There is of course no doubt that in the last analysis the power lies with the regulators but we had not thought it necessary to be too heavy about this. We therefore need to think about a more acceptable presentation and clearer guidelines. There is also more work to be done on how the Convention and Acts of the Union should be arranged to accommodate these new changes. We also need to think about geographical representation taking into account the recent changes in eastern Europe.
10. There will be problems about flexible financing if we keep to the present perfectly logical proposal to lift EMS outside of the regular budget to allow those countries not participating to opt out of paying. Strong views are held on this ranging from the GD net countries who do not wish to finance a service with which they are in direct competition to the Japanese who are so anxious to preserve what they see as the "solidarity of the Union" that they have made a donation of £2.9 million to develop a system of electronic data interchange for EMS in their restricted union. They also went to the lengths of sabotaging the GD net reception for delegates by staging an impromptu party at the very same time. This was quite successful from the Japanese point of view. Given these moves and the tremendously hostile feelings of many members to GD Net it will certainly be difficult to separate EMS out although by making a
a special contribution to this very service outside of the regular budget, the Japanese have actually done this
this and achieved one of the aims for which flexible financing is designed i.e the avoidance of zero real growth.
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