French city cuts subsidies to ‘blackmailing’ Ryanair

A French city said yesterday it was cutting the subsidies it paid Ryanair to maintain flights there because the Irish low-cost airline’s demands were “intolerable” and amounted to blackmail.

The chamber of commerce in Pau, which runs the southwestern city’s airport, has informed Ryanair of its decision “not to pay another penny in fees,” said chamber official Christian Cloux.

Ryanair had asked Pau to hike its subsidies of €1.4 million a year to €1.5 million if it wants it to maintain flights to Britain, Belgium and Paris, he said, calling the demand “financial blackmail”.

“The situation had become intolerable,” he told AFP.

Mr Cloux said it was now up to the airline to decide if it wanted to maintain its routes or not, and added that low-cost airlines CityJet and Flybe were starting up routes from Pau without being promised any subsidies.

Ryanair mostly flies to cheaper and less busy airports across Europe where it pays a fraction of the fees charged at major hubs and where it can achieve faster turnaround times for its planes. It often pressures regional authorities to provide financial aid in return for its continued presence.

The airline said earlier this month that it would reopen most of the routes from the French city Marseille which it shut in protest at being prosecuted over its employment practices.

Ryanair in January abandoned its base at Marseille airport in protest over French prosecutors’ refusal to drop charges against it for hiring workers on Irish contracts, which they said breached labour laws. The company cut 13 routes from Marseille to destinations in Europe and Morocco, served by four aircraft based in the French city. But it continued to run 10 routes to and from the airport by planes based elsewhere.

But Ryanair later said it would reopen routes and get around the court ruling by not basing its planes in Marseille on a permanent basis and by regularly changing the pilots and air crew working on the reopened routes.