Ryanair is taking legal action against the European commission in a bid to claw back €6.4 million that it was forced to return to the French government.
Ryanair wants the EU’s general court to annul a decision by the commission in July 2014 which found that deals the airline struck with Nîmes airport constituted illegal state aid that gave it an unfair economic advantage.
Since 2003, Ryanair has been the only airline offering scheduled services from Nîmes, a small regional airport in the south of France.
The case is the third that Ryanair has launched in the past year against the commission over unfavourable rulings on state aid. The airline also wants decisions in relation to two French airports it no longer flies to, Pau and Angoulême, to be quashed. The two rulings are worth a combined €3.3 million.
“All of Ryanair’s airport arrangements comply fully with state aid rules and so we have instructed our lawyers to appeal these three rulings to the extent they wrongly allege otherwise,” a spokesman for the company said.
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Two of the commission’s investigations into Ryanair’s agreements with the three French airports were initiated after complaints from Air France. It has launched several investigations in the past few years into deals that Ryanair and other low-cost airlines have struck with regional airports throughout Europe.
Ryanair’s spokesman said that the commission had previously confirmed that the airline’s agreements with other airports including Berlin-Schönefeld, Brussels South Charleroi, Marseille Provence and Frankfurt-Hahn complied with EU state aid rules.
“The same rules should apply at Nîmes, Pau and Angoulême,” he said.
Since 2014, Ryanair has been aiming for 50 per cent growth at primary hubs, such as Brussels and Schiphol, in Amsterdam, rather than the regional airports it was previously associated with.
Annual state subsidies to regional airports across Europe are estimated to be worth €2 billion to €3 billion by the NGO Transport & Environment, which campaigns against what it calls unfair state sponsorship of the most carbon-intensive form of transport.