The General Court of the European Union has annulled a decision the European Commission made three years ago to approve subsidies granted to Wizz Air (W6, Budapest) by Timisoara Airport in western Romania between 2007 and 2010.
In its summary of the ruling issued on February 8, Europe’s second-top court said that it “annuls the decision of the European Commission approving Romanian aid to Timisoara International Airport in favour of Wizz Air” as “the Commission committed several errors of law when examining whether those measures were selective and whether they conferred an advantage.”
The airport, in which the Romanian state holds a 80% stake, received funds in 2007 for the construction of a terminal for non-Schengen flights. It then signed agreements with Wizz Air in 2008 and 2010 providing it discounts and rebates on airport charges.
In 2010, Timisoara-based regional carrier Carpatair (V3, Timisoara) submitted a complaint to the European Commission challenging the aid, and two years later it won a Romanian court case to that effect - which Wizz Air denounced at the time as a “flawed judgement”.
However, on February 24, 2020, the commission found that the discounts and rebates on airport charges did not constitute state aid, which prompted Carpatair to bring an action for the annulment of that decision.
The court said it found errors in the commission’s conclusion that the favourable pricing constituted state aid as it was not selective in nature and did not give Wizz Air an economic advantage. The 2010 agreement, for example, set out three types of reductions on the airport charges applicable to all airlines using the airport, one of which provided for discounts of 72% to 85% for aircraft with a maximum take-off weight above 70 tonnes with more than 10,000 embarked passengers per month. According to the commission, such conditions were not selective.
“The Commission did not take a position on the question whether airlines other than Wizz Air had in their fleet aircraft of the relevant sizes and sufficient frequencies which actually enabled them to benefit from the third type of reduction mentioned above,” the court said.
The court concluded that it “finds that the Commission failed to state grounds in law for its conclusion that the 2008 agreements and the 2010 amendment agreements had not conferred an economic advantage on Wizz Air which it would not have obtained under normal market conditions, and that they therefore did not constitute state aid. [...] In the light of those considerations, the Court upholds the action and annuls the contested decision.”
Wizz Air did not immediately respond to ch-aviation’s request for comment.
