Much of the German establishment has learned nothing from the collapse of the Eastern Bloc economies and still believes fervently in state socialism, but Deutsche Bundespost Telekom chief Helmut Ricke can’t wait to get the monolith into the private sector, although he acknowledges that it can’t happen before 1996: he says that although Telekom’s operations are extremely profitable it has to hand over vast amounts of its earnings to the Bonn government in order to support other divisions of the Bundespost, and complains that this structure means it has not been possible to improve the company’s equity position – he says that Telekom is undercapitalised in comparison with competitors in the US and the UK and needs additional equity of between $12,500m and $19,000m, which he hopes will come from flotation.
