Tidbits: EC to Launch Investigation into German and Austrian Airport Subsidies to Ryanair, Germanwings and Air Berlin
Taken from a Reuters article a couple days ago:
EU regulators are investigating whether three regional German airports and one in Austria may have breached EU state aid rules in setting lower charges for budget airlines Ryanair, Lufthansa’s Germanwings and Air Berlin.
More precisely, the European Commission will be investigating unfair and unlawful rebates at Saarbruecken, Zweibruecken, Luebeck-Blankensee (Germany) and Klagenfurt (Austria). This piles up to the investigations currently being led in France, Sweeden, Ireland, Hungary and Romania. Now that’s quite a number of markets, airports and companies. But, according to the official statement:
“On the basis of the information at its disposal the Commission cannot exclude that the measures in favour of the four airports and their customer airlines involve state aid which gives them an unfair advantage vis-Ã -vis their competitors and is thus incompatible with the internal market,” the statement said.
Expect more in-depth coverage of this coming soon. As for now I’ll be watching from the bylines as it becomes more and more evident that the current business model of most low-cost carriers is incompatible with the European rule-of-law (or the other way around, that remains to be seen).
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