L'UE et les Etats-Unis opposés devant l'OMC [FR]

In the filing of its case against the US on 22 March, the European Commission said that the "lavish subsidies" given to Boeing have allowed the US group "to engage in aggressive pricing of its aircraft which has caused lost sales, lost market share and price suppression to Airbus on a number of select markets". 

The EU says that US federal, state and local subsidies benefiting Boeing, amounting to $23.7 billion over the past two decades and up to 2024, are inconsistent with WTO rules. 

Among others, the EU accuses the US of providing vast amounts of hidden support to Boeing through military contracts and federal research programmes, worth around $16.6bn during the past 20 years. 

It also says that Boeing's commercial aircraft division has benefited from "significant federal tax breaks" and points to a $4bn package of tax breaks and exemptions, credits and infrastructure loans from the state of Washington. 

In the hearing on 20-21 March, US officials claimed that the benefits of the $15bn of launch aid awarded to Airbus over the past 30 years by France, Germany, the UK and Spain, amounts to "well over $100bn", based on calculations of the additional cost that Airbus would have incurred if it had obtained financing "at commercial interest rates". 

They said that long-term loans granted by European governments at below-market rates have "enabled Airbus to pursue an aggressive strategy to increase its market share" and to "launch a series of large civil aircraft models at a scale and a pace that would have been impossible without subsidies". 

"Subsidies have enabled Airbus to develop a full family of airliners targeted at its US competitors," the US team said. 

"It is not tolerable that one producer should have ready access to billions of dollars in up-front, risk-free financing" to develop aircraft, they said, adding that the zero-interest repayments, conditional on the commercial success of Airbus models, have cost thousands of American jobs and cut into Boeing's earnings. 

Meanwhile, Gretchen Hamel, a spokeswoman for the US Trade Representative's office, said that the United States was still prepared, and would prefer, to negotiate a solution to financing airliners. 

The European Union rejected the claims and said that Washington had failed to show how Airbus-financing had led to lost sales for Boeing or lowered prices. 

In its defence at the hearing, the EU said that the US case against Airbus "ignores relevant international agreements and is supported by very limited and often incorrect facts". 

Governments' lending policies are "not determined by purely commercial considerations", the EU argues, because they do not need to maximise profits and can "pursue public policy goals." 

The EU said that its governments' lending policies were purely aimed at helping to develop new planes, in support of "public policy goals". It argued that the money was legal because it was repaid as Airbus sold aircraft, although it acknowledged that, in the case of severe production setbacks, the loan terms could benefit the company.