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Ryanair is commendably efficient about boarding and unloading its planes. The same cannot be said for the handling of its six-year-old stake in rival Irish carrier Aer Lingus. In familiarly colourful language, the low-cost airline announced on Tuesday that it is now willing to offload this to another EU-based airline, provided that carrier is making a bid for Aer Lingus and has obtained 50.1 per cent acceptances. The market yawned – Aer Lingus's share price was largely unchanged – and investors should be unimpressed, too.
The statement comes after two bids by Ryanair for Aer Lingus were blocked by European antitrust officials. It also comes just ahead of a final U.K. Competition Commission ruling on whether Ryanair's retention of a minority stake in its Irish rival has anti-competitive implications. The Competition Commission's provisional findings, in May, were that it does. One of the reasons was that this stake might prevent the acquisition of Aer Lingus by another carrier. But that was far from being the whole story. Competition Commission officials thought the Ryanair stake could make it more difficult for Aer Lingus to attract a friendly strategic minority investor, for example, or to proactively manage its Heathrow slot portfolio. In short, assuming those conclusions are confirmed, Ryanair's latest "remedy" offering looks laughably inadequate.
Perhaps the best that investors could conclude is that the low-cost carrier now realises the Aer Lingus saga is into an end-game. If so, it would be nice if it called off its appeal, still under way, over the second EU antitrust block and stood down its lawyers generally on this matter. That would be in the spirit of efficiency. Then again, "nice" was never really Ryanair's most noticeable attribute.