‘Stingy’ Ryanair kept €678 from bailiffs
A public body running Angoulême airport has accused Ryanair of penny-pinching after it withheld a few hundred euros from a sum of more than half a million it owed to get bailiffs to release a plane blocked on the tarmac at Bordeaux.
A dispute between the SMAC (Syndicat Mixte des Aéroports de Charente) and the low-cost airline ended with bailiffs boarding a jet at Bordeaux airport just as it was about to fly to London Stansted airport.
They put seals on it and gave an order that it should not move until the money owing was paid.
However Ryanair refused to pay €678 of the €525,585 total, saying interest charges on the sum should have stopped in September.
SMAC president Didier Villat said: “We will not go to court over it but what meanness. We are a small airport but, by taking the action we did, we showed we stand up for what is right.”
The 149 passengers spent five hours in Bordeaux waiting for another aircraft to arrive to fly them on. Ryanair paid the money owed the next day and the seized aircraft was released to fly away.
The payment brings to an end one of the legal battles which have raged between Ryanair, the SMAC, and French civil air authority the DGAC. Ryanair formerly ran a service to Angoulême airport until the Charente departmental council, part of the SMAC, baulked at the promotional sums the airline asked to be paid.
Since then, European courts found the sums amounted to illegal state subsidies.
A separate legal battle is continuing over the contracts in London, where SMAC was ordered by an arbitration panel to pay €400,000 for allegedly breaking the contract with Ryanair. Mr Villat said French courts had found that they did not have to pay and Ryanair has declined to appeal in the French courts. Ryanair did not respond to requests for comment from Connexion.
Mr Villat said there was no hope of a renewed service to the UK from Angoulême, adding that the battle with Ryanair had been “very damaging”.
Other airports in similar disputes with Ryanair include Montpellier, Nîmes and Pau, but they have not taken matters further so far.
Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary has predicted a difficult winter for the airline industry, blaming strikes and rising oil prices. The firm reports that its net profits have dropped, though they were still €1.2billion in the six months to September this year.
