The results in June should be fun with a big drop in the value of Aer Lingus shares to write down in the books.
I wish people would stop making out that they're hiding their Aer Lingus investment. They've already recognised a €91.6 million balance sheet impairment charge on their Aer Lingus investment in their 2008 results. Up to their Q3 for this year, their results include a charge of €93.6 million to recognise Aer Lingus' €1.40 share price in June 2008. They also pointed out that there would be a further charge of €63.3 million in the Q4 results based on the share price being €1.00. Clearly it looks like it'll end up even higher than this but the point is they've already recognised a significant proportion of overall drop. O'Leary's gone as far as saying he'd prefer to be able to just write off the whole investment at this stage!
At some point they may need to admit that 2009/10 could be loss making.
Granted they're getting fuzzier with certain info (aircraft ownership details, number of planes in service, etc.) but the one thing they generally haven't done to date is give unrealistic profit/loss projections - but there's always a first!