State aid to KLM again? That won’t happen, will it? – Joop

All signals are red again. It is obvious that KLM will again beg for many millions from the taxpayer.

Did you also see the first quarter figures of the French Air France-KLM? You know, our virtually canonized super polluter and noise maker. In three months they lost almost half a billion euros. Again: almost half a billion euros lost! And that was largely due to my own failure. Shortage of staff in vital parts of the company was an extremely important reason.

It was customary to save the French company KLM with taxpayers’ money. The hundreds of millions flew around your ears. Sometimes it was just a kind of gift, other times it was a postponement of tax payments, but the purchase of shares was also a disguised subsidy. The book De Blauwe Fabel by Ties Joosten lists all these matters.

Fresh in our minds is the hasty purchase of shares by then minister Hoekstra. The price has now fallen by about 95%. You now buy a KLM share for the Action price of approximately 95 cents (pre-reverse share split autumn 2023). Taxpayers lost hundreds of millions as a result. We collectively lost hundreds of millions during the corona period.

Now a huge financial problem has presented itself again. The debt burden is much greater than the stock market value, and the cost savings that the State Agent negotiated have not been fully implemented. It is a company that has not paid a dividend for many years. All signals are red again. It is obvious that KLM will again beg for many millions from the taxpayer.

Normally the traveler pays for the costs of the trip and not the taxpayer. If we calculate how much more the ticket would have to cost to fly cost-effectively, we are barely talking about two tens of euros per ticket. Yet it seems that KLM is refusing to increase prices for the time being, while the causes of the heavily increased costs are (predictably) far from being resolved and may never be resolved. For example, it has proven impossible to adjust the mega-high salaries of pilots downwards and make them more in line with the market.

In this piece I will leave out the fact that I believe that KLM should also levy ticket taxes on transfers and tax should be paid on kerosene and exempt activities.

But I’m worried again! It will not be the case that we will again, for the umpteenth time, waste taxpayers’ money on a company that has never been profitable in the long term. A company that practices greenwashing and does not honor agreements. A company that behaved in an intimidating and extremely insulting manner towards the State Agent. The State Agent who tried to introduce care into the revenue model of the blue fable. He did this on behalf of our parliament.

So I see it coming that people are once again trying to extract taxpayers’ money. But I am really ready to say: House of Representatives: State aid to KLM again? That won’t happen, will it?