May 30, 2020
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After tough negotiations between Brussels and Berlin, the rescue package for Lufthansa, which was badly hit, has cleared an important hurdle. The German government and the EU Commission agreed on the capital injection requirements, which the Lufthansa Executive Board approved. Accordingly, the airline must surrender take-off and landing rights at its most important airports in Frankfurt and Munich.
The agreement is only an intermediate step. The supervisory board and shareholders must advise and formal approval from Brussels is still pending. The first reactions were subdued on Saturday. The head of the CDU / CSU MPs in the European Parliament, Daniel Caspary, criticized the line of EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager, which had imposed the requirements for Lufthansa. “As with the prevented merger of the train division of Siemens and Alstom, the following applies to the Lufthansa requirements: The main competitors are located outside Europe, and they can now laugh at each other,” said Caspary of the German Press Agency in Brussels. “It is doing long-term damage to European competitiveness.”
Green MEP Rasmus Andresen, on the other hand, praised the fact that the compromise ensured fair competition between the airlines. “But we would like to see binding climate requirements from both the German government and the EU Commission,” added Andresen.
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