66Exclusive privilege of the Post Office with respect to the conveyance etc. of letters
(1)Subject to the following provisions of this Part, the Post Office shall have throughout the United Kingdom the exclusive privilege of conveying letters from one place to another and of performing all the incidental services of receiving, collecting and delivering letters.
(2)A person who—
(a)does any act, or performs any service, which infringes the exclusive privilege conferred on the Post Office by subsection (1); or
(b)causes to be conveyed, or tenders or delivers in order to be conveyed, any letter by any means which infringes that privilege,
shall be guilty of an offence.
(3)A person guilty of an offence under this section shall be liable—
(a)on summary conviction, to a fine not exceeding the statutory maximum;
(b)on conviction on indictment, to a fine.
(4)Where a body corporate is guilty of an offence under this section and that offence is proved to have been committed with the consent or connivance of, or to be attributable to any neglect on the part of, any director, manager, secretary or other similar officer of the body corporate or any person who was purporting to act in any such capacity, he, as well as the body corporate, shall be guilty of that offence and shall be liable to be proceeded against and punished accordingly.
Where the affairs of a body corporate are managed by its members, this subsection shall apply in relation to the acts and defaults of a member in connection with his functions of management as if he were a director of the body corporate.
(5)In this section and section 67—
" correspondent", in relation to a letter or other communication, means the sender or the addressee ;
" employee ", in relation to a body corporate, includes any officer or director of the body corporate and any other person taking part in its management, and " employer " and other cognate expressions shall be construed accordingly ;
" letter" means any communication in written form which—
(a)is directed to a specific person or address ;
(b)relates to the personal, private or business affairs of, or the business affairs of the employer of, either correspondent; and
(c)neither is to be nor has been transmitted by means of a telecommunication system, and includes a packet containing any such communication ;
" sender ", in relation to any letter or other communication, means the person whose communication it is.
(6)References in the 1953 Act, the 1969 Act or this Part to services which, by virtue of the provisions of this Part, the Post Office has the exclusive privilege of providing are references to services the provision of which by a person other than the Post Office would necessarily infringe the privilege conferred by subsection (1); and for this purpose licences granted under section 68(1) shall be disregarded.