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Koizumi to step down if postal bills fail: official

Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's special envoy said yesterday that the prime minister will dissolve the lower house of parliament and call for general elections if a package of postal bills he has been campaigning for as a symbol of his reform fails during the current session.

"If the bills are scrapped, [Koizumi] will dissolve the parliament. I'm 100 percent positive he will," Taku Yamasaki told Asahi Television's Sunday Project program.

He was responding to a question about the probability of the lower house being disbanded.

"That would be unavoidable, though I believe [the bills] will not be scrapped," he added.

Yamazaki is a director of a special lower house committee debating the postal privatization issue. He was an adviser to Koizumi before taking the position last month.

Lawmakers at the parliament are currently discussing the bills, which aim to reform the country's mammoth postal savings system and create the world's largest bank. A failure of the bills would be a major failure for Koizumi, who has been pushing for the postal reform and promised to get them approved during the current parliamentary session, scheduled to end on June 19. Some officials have begun hinting at the possibility of extending the session.

The plan would privatize the postal system by 2017. The outline calls for splitting state-run Japan Post into separate businesses for mail delivery, banking services and insurance starting in 2007. A fourth company would handle employee salaries and manage post office properties.

Koizumi, who last year said private companies rather than bureaucrats should manage Japan Post's ?350 trillion (US$3.2 trillion) in assets, has faced strong opposition in his own ruling Liberal Democratic Party over the plan.
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