harrie - the headline is somewhat over-exaggerated.
175m of the 209m was down to Air France admitting that they overpaid for VLM or that VLM is worth a lot less than it was. The result is that Air France needs to formally state in the accounts that VLM is no longer worth the purchase price and explicitly state a loss on their investment in VLM. One has to consider whether explicitly announcing a one-off 175m loss on an investment in VLM should have been done in the last set of accounts, or whether it should have been done over previous years instead - it's really an accountancy timing policy question that will be done in a way that best suits the company's executives.
Remove this 175m accounting write down, and the results come in as a loss of 34m euros instead of 209m euros. Certainly not good, but not quite so eye-poppingly bad as the headline makes out