Ryanair ordered to repay millions in ‘illegal’ state aid
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The European Commission has ordered Ryanair to repay millions of pounds in illegal state aid it received for operating from three French airports.
The Commission said the support from France, which included rebates and marketing deals, would put the airline in an ‘unfair advantage’, following a complaint from Air France.
Ryanair has been told to pay back EUR6.4m to Nimes Airport; GBP2.4m to Pau Pyrenees Airport and EUR 868,000 to Angouleme airport, according to the Irish Times.
The Irish carrier has announced it will appeal the ‘erroneous’ decision, as it already has similar terms with other European airports including Niederrhein, Aarhus, Bratislava, Charleroi, Marseille, Berlin Schonefeld and Tempere.
Ryanair’s director of legal and regulatory affairs Juliusz Komorek said in a statement: “We will immediately appeal the decisions in Pau, Angouleme and Nimes cases where the EU Commission mistakenly suggested that the airports’ agreements with Ryanair did not fully comply with the EU State aid rules.
“Ryanair has to date carried 86.5m passengers at the seven airports where our commercial arrangements have been confirmed by the EU Commission and the EU Court to comply with EU law, compared to just 3.4m passengers at the airports where the Commission today suggested that the airport agreements did not comply with State aid rules.
“We remain committed to growing traffic from the current 85m ppa (people per annum) to over 110mppa by FY2019, in partnership with both private and public airports across Europe where all of our arrangements are arms-length commercial deals consistent with the EU Market Economy Investor Principle.”
Ryanair stopped operating from Pau Pyrenees in March 2011 and ceased operations from Angouleme in 2009.
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