WAR FUNDING BILL BLOCKS DHL FROM U.S. GOVERNMENT BUSINESS
A tiny provision of the Emergency Wartime Supplemental Appropriations Act signed by President Bush Wednesday bars the Defense Department or other government agencies from using any of the $79 billion allocated by the funding legislation for fiscal 2003 to purchase freight transport from any air carrier 'not effectively controlled by citizens of the United States.'
Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, led the effort during House-Senate conference negotiations to craft the language, which is aimed at blocking DHL Airways Inc., from getting government business, according to a Senate aide.
DHL participates in the civil reserve air fleet, but rivals parcel carriers FedEx Corp. and United Parcel Service Inc. have been waging a two-year battle to ground the airline arm of DHL Worldwide Express for failing to meet national ownership requirements for U.S. airlines. U.S. law requires air carriers must be 75-percent owned by U.S. citizens in order to do business as a domestic carrier.
The holding company for DHL Worldwide Express is based in Brussels, Belgium, and since December, has been wholly owned by German postal service and global logistics provider Deutsche Post World Net.
The law said an air carrier is not effectively controlled by U.S. interests if it defines got more that 50 percent of its business from a foreign entity during the past three years, that entity has a direct or indirect voting stake in the airline and the entity is owned by a foreign government.
The law does allow the Secretary of Defense to consider the use of non-U.S. airlines if no other U.S. airline is willing to provide transportation.