Ryanair rebuts blackmail claims

AIRLINE CHARGES:RYANAIR'S chief executive, Michael O'Leary, has defended the airline against accusations of financial blackmail made by French regional airports.

Ryanair’s demands for big increases in the “marketing fees” it receives from airports it flies to had outraged a number of local authorities in France. Socialist senator Michel Boutant urged councils that own airports to stand together against Ryanair’s “piracy and thuggery”, and Pau council, in the Pyrenees, accused Ryanair of blackmail over a demand for €1.4 million in subsidies, a quadrupling of its existing deal.

Though the statement came from the city of Pau, O’Leary dismissed it as the work of opposition politicians. “Two of the local opposition councillors have objected to it, saying: ‘We’d be subsidising Ryanair,’ ” he said. “We don’t care if you don’t agree to it. If you don’t, you won’t get the growth. It will go somewhere else. How do we react to the comments of opposition politicians? We don’t.”

He pointed out that the Canary Islands had offered Ryanair “100 per cent discounts” in return for growth.

Boutant, who also leads Charente council, has won backing from a number of other local authorities. The most recent support is from Poitiers, which is refusing to pay €1.7 million in marketing fees, an increase of almost 75 per cent.

After a stormy meeting attended by hundreds of locals, Poitiers has proposed €770,000 for current routes and €1.1 million if Ryanair starts a service between it and southern France.

Meanwhile, O’Leary has said that charging passengers to use toilets aboard his company’s aircraft is “absolutely” still on the agenda but that the plan is being resisted by Boeing, which supplies the airline’s planes, and by the US aviation regulator, which would have to certify any changes to their airframes.

Part of Ryanair’s plan would involve the expensive and complicated installation of an extra row of seats in place of the toilets at the rear of each aircraft, leaving a single toilet at the front. Ryanair says the Federal Aviation Administration is concerned the extra passengers could not be evacuated safely.

If the FAA agreed to the changes, the airline would then need approval from the European Aviation Safety Agency, according to the Irish Aviation Authority.