German airport Frankfurt-Hahn GmbH files for insolvency

Frankfurt-Hahn GmbH, the company which operates an airport some 100 kilometres west of Frankfurt, has filed for insolvency, operations manager Christoph Goetzmann told dpa on Tuesday.

Hahn Airport is 82.5-per-cent owned by the Chinese conglomerate HNA. The company acquired the shares from the state of Rhineland-Palatinate - where the airport is located - in 2017 for around 15 million euros (17.5 million dollars). The remaining 17.5 per cent is held by the state of Hesse.

Most recently, the arrest of the top management of the financially troubled HNA Group caused a stir.

At the time, the airport company emphasized that this would have no effect on Frankfurt-Hahn. The airport was on a good course, it said at the beginning of October.

The airport, which was once a US military airport and subsequently a hub for budget carrier Ryanair, has benefited from a boom in airfreight resulting from online purchases and bottlenecks in sea freight.

However, even before the coronavirus pandemic hit, passenger traffic had declined from highs of around 4 million a year. Dublin-based Ryanair has cut its flights and shifted traffic to larger airports in the region.

In its report for 2020, the airport management acknowledged it would not be making a profit, but predicted that it could go into the black by 2024.

Earlier this year, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) threw out an application from Lufthansa targeting the state aid that Frankfurt-Hahn had received. The legal action turned on subsidies paid since 1997 and contracts with Ryanair on airport fees.

Tuesday's insolvency application was filed with the district court in the town of Bad Kreuznach, with the court appointing Frankfurt lawyer Jan Markus Plathner as provisional insolvency administrator.