Brussels, 18/06/2001 (Agence Europe) - European Commissioner Pascal Lamy went to Toulouse on Friday for "working talks" with the managers of Airbus Industrie and visit the development site of the planned A380 large civil aircraft, for which he thus confirmed his support. In Brussels on 17 July, Europeans and Americans must resume last winter's vehement talks on this plan and the indirect subsidies to Boeing that the Community is challenging as a counter-attack, in the hope of defusing a new trade conflict.
As we stand, the European Commission is waiting to hear from the United States, Washington still not having reacted to the detailed information supplied to it, on 19 April, concerning the financial assistance the 7 Member States will provide, in the form of refundable loans, for the development of the Airbus super-jumbo. This information, covered by trade secrecy, sets out the amount of money being forwarded, the percentage of public support in relation to the cost of the project's development, the duration planned for repaying the loans (the maximum being 17 years), the expected return by governments sponsoring it (minimum level of cost for the government in question, plus 0.25%), the forecast number of sales of the A380 aircraft necessary to the repayment. "This threshold has been attained", sources close to the issue stipulate regarding the purchasing promises, the last of the 5 elements in the exchange of information which the Union and the United States had undertaken to proceed with in the framework of their 1992 bilateral agreement on State aid to the construction of civilian aircraft of over 100 seats.
To date, seven Member States out of the nine participating in the project have made aid commitments; these are France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands and Finland; the other two, Italy and Sweden, could soon undertake to provide direct aid. In the hypothesis of this additional dual contribution, the total amount of refundable loans should remain beneath the 33% ceiling of the total cost of the development programme. From the Commission's point of view, all this information "fully respects the criteria set out in the transatlantic agreement"