The EU’s expensive, empty airports

16/12/2014

An airport that loses €275 per passenger. A €16.5m runway that has never been used by the aircraft for which it was built. Another airport that receives just 4 per cent of the travellers that were forecast.

These are some of the highlights of a report into EU-funded airports by the European Court of Auditors issued on Tuesday. In total, the EU spent €129m between 2000 and 2013 – or a quarter of all airport funding – on facilities that did not need to be built, according to the 70-page report littered with tales of delays and over-optimistic forecasts.

Even those airports that were eventually financially viable proved to be an inefficient use of money, according to the auditors. A stunning 55 per cent of the EU funds audited, or €255m, went into airports that were “unnecessarily large”.

The report examined 20 airports built in Spain, Italy, Greece, Poland and Estonia with €666m of EU funds, of which €460m was audited.

One airport in the northern Greek town of Kastoria had running costs of €7.7m between 2005 and 2012, while revenues came in at €176,000. In this period, it had 25,000 passengers – or roughly ten passengers per day on average. The €275 loss per passenger was particularly egregious as a much larger airport at Thessaloniki was just two hours away by car, pointed out one auditor. “You could have had a limousine for each passenger,” he added.

At the same airport, the EU approved a €16.5m extension to a runway, which has yet to be used by the aircraft that required the longer landing strip. “This cannot be considered an effective use of public funds,” the report deadpans.

In many cases, the hordes of passengers predicted when the funds were granted failed to materialise. Córdoba airport in Spain received just 7,000 passengers in 2013, compared to a forecast of 179,000.

A spokesman for the European Commission, which oversees such programmes, said that the report was unrepresentative and that Brussels had overhauled the way that it dishes out fund for airports to avoid these mistakes happening again. “There is a new structure that we are using so that we get even better at redistributing regional aid,” said the spokesman.

Fans of EU waste and pictures of empty airports can read the full report here.

Πηγή

The author forgot to mention the airport of Berlin which after 8 years cost 6 billion euros and it is still under construction..