Commenting today Ryanair's spokesman, Peter Sherrard said, "today's announcement proves that the European Commission has a biased approach to State Aid investigations. It continues to ignore billions of state aid to flag carrier airlines in the form of discounted domestic charges, exclusive use of terminal facilities and annual bail outs to Alitalia and Olympic Airlines, yet at the same time the Commission is wasting time and resources investigating the cost base of small secondary airports such as Lubeck and Tampere, which without Ryanair would have no traffic at all, or the main airports of secondary cities such as Berlin and Dortmund, which would have far smaller traffic numbers were it not for the services provided by Easyjet."
Poor Tampere. I've been there. Finland's only low-cost terminal is so small that any EU Commission's intervention concerning this miniature old building with minimal facilities is shame for them, really. It's a kind of poultry-house, not a terminal.
Nevertheless; Mr. Sherrard, are you sure about the "
secondary city Berlin"? I know, you weren't allowed to create your own airport there, but I would never call Germany's capital city a secondary one. By the way, do you realize, with SXF you could start a new case concerning the anti-competitive regulations! As you know, the local authorities made all they could to cripple the development of any other airport in the region (Neuhardenberg or Finow, to mention just these). And the official motivation was: "It is truely in our interest not to allow any competition to BBI." (Mayor Klaus Wowereit). Wow, aren't they breaching the competition rules?