Kinnock faces grilling from aviation’s wise men

Date: 15/02/1996

THE drubbing he received from his old enemies in the British press and parliament will worry Neil Kinnock less than his lunch date with the remnants of the Comité des Sages on 21 March.

The committee, convened by the Commission in 1993 under the chairmanship of Herman De Croo, looked into European civil aviation and made a series of recommendations.

While parts of their report were incorporated into the Commission's state aid guidelines of December 1994, many were not. “We never excluded the possibility of airlines increasing their capital through their shareholders, but we did attach conditions,” says De Croo.

Those conditions were:

(a) the aid should genuinely be 'one time, last time'

(b) the restructuring plan should achieve commercial viability within a set time-frame and must attract “significant interest” from the private sector, leading ultimately to privatisation (c) the plan should be vetted by independent experts and this analysis should be published with the Commission decision.

For De Croo, these conditions are vital, but impossible to implement under existing treaty provisions.

“The Commission cannot judge who the shareholders of a company should be, “ he says. “They cannot force a public company into the hands of private shareholders.”