STATE AIDS TO AIRLINES DUE TO COVID-19 AND RYANAIR’S ACTIONS 721 examine with particular care the relationship between the companies belonging to that group in order to determine whether it may be regarded as a single economic unit – and, therefore, as single beneficiary – for the purposes of the application of the rules on State aid. The Court notes that the contested decision does not contain any information concerning the composition of the shareholders of Air France and KLM as regards the functional, economic and organic links between the holding company Air France-KLM and its subsidiaries. Since the two rulings were issued on the same date – 19 May 2021 –, it is questionable whether these reasons made sense with respect to KLM, and less so concerning TAP, which ended up taking the fall as a result. In fact, the European court could have considered the difference between the shareholders of the Air France-KLM holding company and those of TAP – after the State, TAP’s strongest shareholders are a Brazilian carrier and a road transport operator, the former having left the shareholder structure in the meantime. Although supervening the Commission’s decision, the General Court, in TAP’s case, could have dismissed the accumulation of State aid, which clearly did not and could not have existed, and examined the traditional pleas raised by Ryanair. In the previous cases of aid to airlines, this was not done and neither in other sectors. In this period, the Commission has been inundated with notifications; the number of specialists in state aid is naturally smaller than in other areas of competition law, and decisions are imposed within a few days, so that the disruption to the economy is as little as possible. In air transport, there is also a fierce Ryanair campaign, which raises a wide range of pleas, including the one it has always put forward. The infringement of the duty to state reasons did not occur in the cases mentioned above, but when it came to KLM, it is understandable that the General Court needed those elements to validate the Commission’s decision. Given the composition of the shareholders of Air France and KLM concerning the functional, economic and organic links between the Air France-KLM holding company and its subsidiaries, this was bound to be the case. TAP ends up being collateral damage, not least because both decisions of the General Court were issued on the same day.
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