BRUSSELS, Feb 19 (Reuters) - The European Commission is not considering easing merger rules for telecoms deals, EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said on Monday, adding that the focus should be removing barriers to a single European market for the telecoms industry.

Vestager's comments come after a Commission document seen by Reuters last week suggested that EU antitrust regulators may loosen merger rules to make it easier for EU telecoms companies to merge.

Asked by reporters about any possible changes in EU merger rules, Vestager said: "No, none that I have heard of."

Vestager's position appears to differ from EU industry chief and former France Telecom CEO Thierry Breton who has pushed to loosen merger rules for telecoms providers.

Vestager said the absence of a single European telecoms market needed addressing.

"So one of my hobby horses is indeed to push for taking away the barriers that disable us from having a real European single market for telcos," she said.

"Because that means when you have a fragmented marketplace, you make it very difficult for businesses to harvest scale and because of that to harvest efficiencies. And we have a couple of ideas as to how to make that happen," Vestager said.

She pointed to spectrum - owned and regulated by each EU country and viewed by some governments more as a lucrative source of revenue than a way to advance the telecoms market - as one barrier.

"Because the business potential is so much bigger because you know if you have a more centralized spectrum management, you can actually harvest efficiencies that are not possible today," Vestager said. (Reporting by Foo Yun Chee Editing by David Evans and Mark Potter)