The Finnish State rejected today the EU-commission's accusations of unlawful state aid to Ryanair concerning its operations at Tampere Pirkkala airport.
In July 2007 the European Commission has started an investigation concerning the alleged State aid involving Ryanair at Tampere-Pirkkala Airport. The Finnish Ministerial Commission has totally rejected these allegations and affirms that there has not been any kind of violation of the EU rules. The main features are:
- there was no state aid at all given to Ryanair
- even if state aid were involved, it would comply with the acceptable competition rules [as the costs structure does]
- there were no financial losses to the State nor any alleviations to the airport managing company, the Finnish Commission did not discover any cross-subsidies concerning these activities
- the charges paid by Ryanair match the costs involved and do generate profits for the airport
- the costs involved in the refurbishment a freight terminal into one suitable for low-cost passenger service operations were minimal and the low-cost terminal standard is much lower than in Terminal 1, hence the gradation of charges is justified.
Here you can find the
link to the original full text in Finnish.
As a short comment to the issue. All that fuss has been caused by SAS on the behalf of its subsidiary Blue1. They didn't even intend to use the Terminal 2 in TMP (offered to them as well) because of its very low standards, much lower than their own requirements. But yes, they wanted Ryanair to pay the same charges that SAS and Blue1 are paying for the high-standard Terminal One. In my opinion many competitors blame Ryanair for every single price-deal they get, being unable to stick to the low-cost rules themselves. By the way, the European Commission's involvement in the "do-it-yourself" refurbishment of a trivial miniature rathole, a shanty being still unworthy to call it a "terminal" is just ridiculous, don't you think?