French airline company Air France announced on 11 March in a press release that it had lodged a complaint with the European Commission at the end of 2009 about aid measures implemented by French regional and local airports for the airline company Ryanair. It challenges the fact that Ryanair conditions «the use of an airport to the implementation by public people exploiting these airports of aid measures in its favour», which Air France deems to be «directly against European rules».

According to an Air France estimate, quoted in the French press, this aid is reported to have come to 660 million euro in Europe in 2008, 35 million of which in France, in the form of aid for starting up, refunds on assistance for stopovers and airport fees.

It is not the first time that Ryanair, which has been growing fast in recent years and flew a total of 65.3 million people in 2009, has been the target of such accusations. Over the years, the Commission has opened a series of investigations into public aid obtained by Ryanair in exchange for it setting up in airports, often regional ones that were not very well developed before its arrival. But the low cost airline won a big victory at the European Court of Justice in 2008 when the ECJ forced Ryanair to refund aid obtained for serving Charleroi airport in Belgium. In January, the Commission brought to a close an investigation into possible illegal public aid in connection with Bratislava airport.

Ryanair lodged a complaint in 2007 with regard to supposed state aid to Air France and Lufthansa. n