Ryanair says authorities had invalid warrant for Dublin HQ raid
Ryanair has claimed in the High Court that a search of its premises by officials from competition authorities in Ireland and Italy, accompanied by gardaí, was conducted with an invalid warrant.
The airline is asking the court to quash the warrant, issued by the Dublin Metropolitan District Court last March 8, on grounds that the issuing judge was wrongly not informed about two key Italian rulings that it says supports its position that it is not abusing its dominant market position. It alleges the Italian competition authority, Autorita Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato (AGCM), and its Irish counterpart, the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC), breached its fundamental rights by failing to tell the District Court judge about relevant information and by acting on a warrant that contained errors.
The court should declare that the material seized is, either in whole or in part, tainted by illegality and is inadmissible and should not have been removed from Ireland, Ryanair says.
Thirty officers of both authorities and gardaí conducted an unannounced inspection of Ryanair’s premises in Swords, north Dublin, on March 8.
The CCPC said the search was conducted on behalf of the AGCM. The Italian authority announced in September last year that it had opened an investigation into Ryanair for “possible abuse of a dominant (market) position”.
In an affidavit, Ryanair’s head of competition, Eoin Kealy, said the company has co-operated with the AGCM throughout its investigation, which arose out of claims from two Italian travel agency associations and a consumer association.
They allege Ryanair’s model of direct online sale of its tickets to consumers constitutes an abuse of a dominant position under Italian and EU law, he said. Ryanair precludes travel agencies from purchasing tickets via its website, where the lowest fares are available, and directs them instead to a global distribution system, he said.
The Italian associations allege this policy jeopardises the performance of effective competition in the tourism services market to the detriment of travel agencies, leading to negative effects for their consumers, he said.
Ryanair “entirely rejects” those allegations and is supported in its position by two decisions of the Court of Appeal of Milan in cases against the airline, Mr Kealy said. That court last January found Ryanair’s conduct in reserving the online sale of tickets to itself did not constitute abuse of position, and this should have been flagged to the judge who issued the warrant, he added.