Ryanair is to reduce the frequency of its Malta-Girona service to two flights a week instead of three as from May 1, informed sources said.

Flights will be operated on Saturdays and Tuesdays, with the Irish low-cost carrier dropping its Thursday flight.

Ryanair is reducing services from Girona because of disagreements over subsidies for the use of that airport. Malta has been among the destinations least affected. The airline has cancelled 18 routes and reduced services to another 17 destinations. Five Ryanair aircraft which used to be based there have been moved elsewhere. The airline blamed the new regional government of Catalonia for not honouring the recent five-year agreement for the airline to base aircraft there.

In a similar situation, a French city has announced that it is ending the subsidies it pays Ryanair to maintain flights there because the Irish low-cost airline's demands are "intolerable and amount to blackmail".

The chamber of commerce in Pau, which runs the southwestern city's airport, 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 from €1.4 million a year to €1.5 million if it wanted to maintain flights to Britain, Belgium and Paris, he said, calling the demand "financial blackmail."

"The situation had become intolerable," he told AFP.

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.

He said that if Ryanair services from Pau ceased when its contract expires in April, this could cause a "small drop in traffic" but this would be "quickly compensated" for by other services and would not impact on jobs.

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.