The supervisory board of the state-owned Kärntner Beteiligungsverwaltung decided on Monday evening that the call option on the majority currently held by Lilihill at Klagenfurt Airport will be exercised. This means that not only political but also legal disputes are inevitable.

The meeting itself must have resembled an absurd posse, because before the vote, the supervisory boards nominated by the SPÖ and FPÖ demonstratively left the room. The other people, mostly nominated by the ÖVP, voted unanimously for the buyback of Klagenfurt Airport.

However, the resolution of the KBV supervisory board alone is not sufficient to actually be able to exercise the call option. The approval of the state parliament is also required and due to the completely different positions of the governing parties SPÖ and ÖVP, it is anything but certain that there is a required majority decision here. Perhaps that is why the KBV supervisory board members nominated by the SPÖ and FPÖ demonstratively left the meeting room and thus did not participate in the voting of the supervisory board.

The next steps are not so clear. Representatives from majority owner Lilihill are also reported to have presented their views during the meeting. While Franz Orasch's group of companies enjoys the support of the governor's party SPÖ, the ÖVP - above all Provincial Councilor Martin Gruber - wants to bring the airport back into majority ownership of the state of Carinthia (via the KBV holding).

With regard to the call option, reference is made to an expert opinion that states, among other things, that Lilihill cannot excuse Corona because of the sharp drop in passenger numbers in 2020 and 2021. Put simply, this would not matter. The majority owner sees it completely differently, because there was almost no demand due to lockdowns and travel restrictions, among other things, and the airlines had to drastically reduce their offers. At times, the entry and quarantine regulations were so strict that they could only be met by extremely few people who fell under the small exceptions. Airlines could hardly earn any money with these and as a result many airports, including Klagenfurt, were downright idle.

A legal dispute is therefore inevitable, which could drag on for several years and all instances, unless an out-of-court agreement can somehow be reached. However, the latter is considered extremely unlikely. This is definitely a problem for Klagenfurt Airport, because the majority ownership and thus also the question of who is in charge could literally hang in the air for several years. Lilihill could put off necessary investments because you don't know how everything will turn out and if you'll ever get back the money you put into the fight. Conversely, the state of Carinthia and its investment management could behave.

So it remains to be seen whether the low-cost airline Ryanair, which wants to return to Carinthia with several routes at the beginning of the 2022/23 winter flight planning period, will accept the possibly unstable conditions in the area of ​​ownership or will call off the comeback again. After all, the low-cost airline has plenty of experience with bankruptcy airports, because it was the last customer in Lübeck before the last bankruptcy and Frankfurt-Hahn, the largest base of the low-cost airline in Germany, is in insolvency proceedings with an uncertain future.