Tuesday, October 19, 2021
Investors arrested
Frankfurt-Hahn Airport is insolvent
Hahn Airport in Hunsrück is more than 120 kilometers from Frankfurt am Main. Those who fly from Hahn have often already traveled a long way. Passenger numbers have been falling in recent years, Ryanair is pulling back a little, and the Chinese owner is in trouble.
Flughafen Frankfurt-Hahn GmbH in Hunsrück has filed for bankruptcy. Hahn operations manager Christoph Goetzmann said the bankruptcy petition had been submitted to the Bad Kreuznach district court. The court appointed the Frankfurt lawyer Jan Markus Plathner as the preliminary insolvency administrator. Hahn Airport is 82.5 percent owned by the major Chinese group HNA. The company acquired the shares in 2017 for around 15 million euros from the state of Rhineland-Palatinate. The remaining 17.5 percent are still with the State of Hesse.
Most recently, the arrest of the top management of the financially troubled HNA group caused a stir. You are suspected of having committed “criminal acts”. HNA did not give any details, but announced that the bankruptcy and restructuring process was continuing as planned. The group with its aviation and tourism subsidiaries is in financial difficulties and should be broken up. In the past, the widespread conglomerate was involved in, among other things, Deutsche Bank and the Hilton hotel chain
After the arrest, the Hunsrück airport emphasized that this had no effect on the rooster. The airport was on the right course, it was said at the beginning of October. The airport recently posted growth in its freight business, with the former US military airport benefiting from the boom in online trading and container bottlenecks in the sea business, among other things. In the passenger business, on the other hand, Hahn had to accept declines again and again, even before the Corona travel restrictions in 2020.
The regional airport once had up to four million passengers a year, but it is now a long way from that. The top dog in the passenger business on Hahn, the Irish low-cost airline Ryanair, reduced its offer in the Hunsrück and relocated flights to neighboring, larger airports.
Without short-time work in the corona crisis
Goetzmann emphasized at the beginning of October that he had steered the tap through the corona pandemic without aid and without short-time work. According to their report published in the Federal Gazette, the airport management nonetheless expected a shortfall in 2020. Depending on the course of the pandemic, plans are “that by 2024 a positive consolidated annual result can be achieved,” it said. After that, airports are generally no longer allowed to receive state subsidies in accordance with EU law.
A legal dispute over taxpayers’ money in the millions for Frankfurt-Hahn Airport was decided this summer. At the time, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) rejected a complaint by Lufthansa. The ECJ confirms a previous judgment. The dispute concerned state aid since 1997 for the Hunsrück airport and contracts with Ryanair on airport charges.
The airport had 1.5 million passengers before the Corona crisis in 2019. In April 1999 the first passenger plane landed there – a plane operated by the Irish low-cost airline Ryanair. This “historic date” heralded a new era of air travel for the whole of Germany: that of low-cost airlines, according to the airport. Most recently, 30 holiday destinations were flown to from Frankfurt-Hahn. The airport had a 24-hour operating permit; it was therefore also an important freight base. In 2019, over 170,000 tons of freight were handled there.