SPS urges customers to collect their packages on time |15 September 2022

The joint press conference (Photo: Patsy Canaya)

• Surcharge will be in place soon for uncollected items

The Seychelles Postal Services (SPS) will soon charge customers extra, per day, per packet for uncollected packages, said a top official.

SPS official, Sabrina Hoareau, made the announcement yesterday morning during a joint press conference with the Seychelles Revenue Commission (SRC) at the latter’s headquarters at Maison Collet, when urging customers to collect their imported items at the post office in a timely manner, and to follow the correct customs procedures.

According to Ms Hoareau, lack of accurate information provided by clients such as their addresses, email and phone numbers, mean the postal services is unable to communicate with them for collection of their packages.

“From 2016 to 2019, we had a total of 17,286 uncollected packages in storage and we could not return them to senders or suppliers, because as you know there was the Covid-19 pandemic which led to closures of borders and total lockdowns in 2020. By the time the borders opened, so much time had elapsed and the international postal services were not accepting the packages,” explained Ms Hoareau.

Following this, the SPS with the assistance of the Customs Division held a comprehensive exercise at district level to distribute some of these packages and it managed to deliver around 7,239 packages. 8360 were delivered at the post office between June 2020 and February 2022.

Ms Hoareau said the remaining 1,687 were handed over to Customs in March this year.

“Under its mandate the postal services cannot seize or dispose of any package so all these packages have to be handed over to Customs and they will do the necessary.”

For its part, the Customs division also tries to reach the customers to notify them of their packages and to send a notice of seizure.

According to François Ally, once the packages end up at Customs, there is an additional R20 fee for rent charge per day that comes into force after seven days from notification.

“Some people have asked us to remove the rent charge because they said they had not been notified by the postal services and were therefore not aware. We are reviewing these requests on a case by case basis,” said Mr Ally.

He said the last resort will then be to dispose of the packages either through donation to an institution or agencies, auction sale or public sale in accordance with the Management Regulations 2014 Chapter 8 of Disposal of Goods.

Customs Division held a first auction sale in July and plans the next one in November, whereas a public sale will take place next month.

Meanwhile, as part of measures to encourage customers to collect their items within the specified time, the SPS plans to introduce a new extra charge soon.

“We are going to implement some new measures soon where if after seven days after receiving our message you do not come forward, we will apply a surcharge, where you will be charged a fee per day per package,” said Ms Hoareau.

Ms Hoareau said discussions are still underway to agree on a fee and this will be communicated to the public soon.

The postal services is urging customers to update their personal contact information via its website at www.seychelespost.gov.sc or by email customerservice@seychellespost.gov.sc to facilitate the verification procedure once their packages reach its office.

Patsy Canaya