Aviazione News

The long-running row over alleged state aid at Charleroi airport will be re-ignited today as Ryanair takes the stand at the European Court of First Instance in Luxembourg.

The low-cost carrier will tell the court that the European Commission’s 2004 finding of illegal state aid at the state-owned Belgian airport was “fundamentally flawed” based on at least seven separate legal arguments.

The one-day hearing is the culmination of a legal challenge that was launched by Ryanair in May 2004, some three months after the EC announced its finding of state aid and ordered Ryanair to repay €4m in grants to the local authorities at Charleroi.

The money has been held in an escrow account since 2004, pending the outcome of this legal challenge.

Ryanair’s head of legal and regulatory affairs Jim Callaghan will tell the court that the 2004 decision failed to take account of a range of factual evidence, including the fact that Ryanair’s deal was also open to any other airline with a similar scale of operations at Charleroi.

Mr Callaghan will also argue that the Charleroi deal was compliant with the EC’s Market Economy Investor Principle since Ryanair had demonstrated it was getting cheaper deals than Charleroi at a number of privately-owned airports.

“There’s no silver bullet in there, we’ll basically be saying the same stuff we’ve been saying for four years,” said one source.

When the Charleroi verdict was first announced, some quarters predicted mass backlash throughout Ryanair’s network of state owned European airports. Such a backlash has largely failed to materialise, as several more recent agreements have been all but tailor made around the Charleroi judgement.

The EC has, however, taken a handful of similar challenges against Ryanair’s airport deals, most recently with yesterday’s announcement of an investigation into possible state aid to Ryanair at Bratislava Airport in Slovakia.

Unlike Charleroi, which was Ryanair’s first European base, none of these latest challenges have centred around airports where Ryanair bases planes.

At today’s hearing Ryanair will argue the Commission has shown “unjustified and politically corrupt bias” by frequently investigating Ryanair for alleged small scale state aid breaches while refusing to investigate Ryanair’s allegations of multi-million euro state aid in favour of most of Europe’s flag carriers.

The Irish airline is suing the EC for failing to investigate a number of these cases, in an action which will ultimately come before the same Luxembourg court at some stage in the future.

Source: www.indipendent.ie